Many reporting and analysis products rely on SQL and MDX to obtain their data. In the context of delivering analytics, these query languages can get extremely complicated and, even if the syntax does exist to deliver the result, it might require changes to the database or datawarehouse or for a new cube to be designed and maintained. Any of these mitigations raise the cost and risk of the solution.

The root cause is that many analytics require sequential passes, multi-datasource data access, and iterative processing. In some situations, Excel is used to mitigate, but it is not a strong solution because formulae and ranges and relationships between data can be easily broken due to dynamic nature of production data and business in general.

In contrast, nextanalytics offers the ability to design "simple" SQL or MDX queries, ones that don’t need a lot of training and expertise, and certainly won’t require changes to a database or to build a complex relationship with an Excel workbook. Then, nextanalytics follows up with scripts to perform the requisite sequential, iterative, and multi-data source steps. This saves a great deal of complexity with producing dashboards that have analytics in them, and makes many projects feasible which otherwise wouldn’t be.

There are over 100 commands that can be put together in almost any combination. These are stored in text based script files, playable on demand. These can be parameterized to give the end user some degree of control over what the operations do. The scripts can be run in real-time or in batch and can read and write data in a wide variety of ways. In fact, since we also offer a unix version, the scripts can do a data processing on one server and send full or partial subsets to another platform.

nextanalytics is multi-page, which means that each operation you perform is still resident and can be rendered or cached. Pages are referenceable objects, which means they serve as input to the next command. This is how we deliver on the ability to be iterative and sequential. An analogy would be that pages are similar in concept to worksheets. Each time you issue a nextanalytics command, a new "sheet" is created and it is automatically the input to the next command.

And, an important point: nextanalytics is multi-datasource. It can load a CSV file as well as a database or cube query, all at the same time, each one in its own page. And then the result sets can be compared. This has great advantage when you want to visualize a comparison between a budget spreadsheet and actual values.