How the Pace of IT’s Innovation Has Turned Accurity into an Adaptable Powerhouse
How the speed of innovation changes the game
What our grandparents’ generation had their whole lives to learn and master, the current generations are expected to adapt to, within just a few years, before the next big breakthrough comes along.
Similarly, new industry standard technologies are being developed every year with a frequency that effectively erases the possibility of one person, or even one organization, to learn to use all of them, or even know about all of them.
In our professional sphere where we strive to map out our customers’ data in their databases, the frequency of innovation in data storage technologies and approaches is what we experience the most often. While you would generally want to be able to connect to all major databases that your customers might run before you release your data governance tool just a few decades earlier, that is not what we do.
Not only would that be extremely hard to achieve with the plethora of popular databases that are out there, it would also be very inefficient and impractical given the always shorter time between releases of innovative data storage and processing systems.
Adapt or perish
In the world of academic education, in decades and centuries past, students used to deal with limited access to information. Now, however, that is no longer the case with the current technology and level of information availability. Students at today’s universities and colleges have to learn the methodology of ingesting and processing information in a world where knowledge, previously locked behind the walls of prestigious education centers, is either freely available on the internet or – in the worst case – hidden behind a ResearchGate paywall.
Experiencing similar scenarios, companies that provide data services need to shift away from focusing on having access to all the major, popular databases and data sources. Instead, they should focus on being able to quickly adapt to evolving circumstances and their tools being able to access any required data sources within a reasonably short time after they’re introduced to it.
This is the path that Accurity took from when it was founded. The metadata management suite Accurity taps into the data databases and other data sources of its customers to retrieve data catalogs, data profiles, and to manage data quality. To that end, it features connectors to data sources which are 100% based on customer requests.
One of the great strengths of Accurity is the ability of its developers to create new on-demand connectors without making the customers wait at all. This quarter, a customer approached our team with a condition of purchase – that Accurity must be able to connect to two very different databases, namely Google BigQuery and the NoSQL database MongoDB.
Compared to each other they are both very different beasts. MongoDB is non-relational; it uses different data formats to standard tabular relation databases. This database type was popularized mostly by companies in need of big data operations and real-time data processing.
BigQuery on the other hand is a data warehouse that uses no servers at all, rather running fully on Google Cloud. It is not a substitute for a classical SQL database, but its main feature that draws in users is the immense capacity of data that it can smoothly run through the plethora of statistical and analytical tools. However, it can still be interacted with using standard ANSI SQL. BigQuery is able to analyze data with machine learning features to provide valuable business intelligence (BI) insights.
Despite being so different in structure, principle and purpose, our team had the connectors to both built, tested, and deployed within 24 hours from the customer request being made!
It does not end there…
Accurity believes in customer-centricity and flexibility in all things. In today’s world there is no time to waste on developing features that none of your customers has a need for. Being able to base our development of new features on the requests coming directly from our customers and the ever-changing market, while always comparing them with our overarching vision, has allowed us to build a data governance tool unlike others out there – one that is built for business users by listening to business users.
We continue to build our suite according to this principle. You can see what features we have added recently on our website along with features that are coming soon on our public roadmap.
Do you still want to know more? Why don’t you ask us in person? Schedule a free, live demo with us and let us show you what use Accurity can be to you and your business.
