COMP-14: EasyAsk

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COMP-14 EasyAsk Natural Language Ad-Hoc Query
Reporting A Users Experience
Dr. Larry R. Harris
Progress EasyAsk
Adrian OBrien
Cardif Pinnacle
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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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EasyAsk Natural Language
DBMS
Logical View
Physical View
SQL
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Fundamentals of EasyAsk
EasyAsk Goals

• Ease of information access to a broader set of
  users
• Lower the technical requirements
• SQL
• DB Schema
• Use the language people already know!
• English
• French, German, Portuguese in Beta
• (Spanish, Italian, Dutch) as required

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Usage Examples

• Business users need to find information
• Give me a pie chart of the sales in each
  region for last month
• Managers monitor their business
• Sends email alerts if key measurements are
  out-of-bounds
• Administrators understand how EasyAsk is being
  used and how to improve it
• Show me last weeks questions that were not
  answered.

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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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Selected Customers
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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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Key EasyAsk Constructs

• Query Builder
• Saved Requests
• Finding a Column
• The Map
• How tables will be joined together
• User Key
• What columns will be displayed when a table name
  is referred to in a query
• Dictionary Inheritance

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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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Deploying EasyAsk

• Security
• Performance
• Range of Expression
• Database Design Idiosyncrasies
• Usage Examples
• Integration

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Security

• Dynamic Role-Based Security
• Each User Group Provides
• Row Level Security
• Column Level Security
• Standard Reports still work, but will provide
  null results for secure data items
• Passed Ceridian Security Audit

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Performance

• Generates very high quality SQL
• Eliminates any possibility of a non-specified
  join
• Governors for
• CPU Time
• Result Set Size

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Range of Expression

• The way the User enters the question is correct
  way
• The following questions all provide the same
  answer
• How many customers bought seafood in each state?
• Whats the number of seafood customers in every
  state?
• By state, give me a count of the customers who
  bought seafood.
• Count the seafood customers in each state.

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Database Design Idiosyncrasies

• What percent of employees with employee deferral
  contributions are eligible?
• SQL-gt SELECT count(distinct sd0002.dbo. employee
  .employee_id) as "Count", (100 count(distinct
  sd0002.dbo. employee .employee_id)) / (Select
  count(distinct sd0002.dbo. employee .employee_id)
  From employee Where sd0002.dbo. history_view
  .cashltgt0 and fn UCase(sd0002.dbo. history_view
  .portion_code)'EEDF' and sd0002.dbo.
  history_view .category'02') as "Percent" FROM
  sd0002.dbo. employee , sd0002.dbo. history_view
  WHERE (sd0002.dbo. history_view .cashltgt0 and fn
  UCase(sd0002.dbo. history_view .portion_code)'EE
  DF' and sd0002.dbo. history_view .category'02'
  and fn UCase(sd0002.dbo. employee .status) in
  ('ACT', 'NPA', 'INA', 'PEN')) and sd0002.dbo.
  employee .client_nbrsd0002.dbo. history_view
  .client_nbr and sd0002.dbo.employee.employee_idsd
  0002.dbo. history_view .employee_id
• Users must carry around a Cheat-Sheet to
  remember the design idiosyncrasies of the
  database
• What if a new eligible code is created?

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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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Agenda
EasyAsk Ad-Hoc Query Reporting

• What is EasyAsk?
• Who is Using EasyAsk?
• Building a Dictionary
• Deploying EasyAsk
• EasyAsk Reports
• New EasyAsk Features

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New EasyAsk Features

• Query Builder Help Users Find the Column
• Search Capability for Columns
• Hide all but the most meaningful columns
• Show columns relevant to a specific report
  category

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Thank You!

• Questions?

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(No Transcript)
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An overview of EasyAsk within Cardif Pinnacle
Presented By Adrian OBrien, General Manager MI
Projects, Cardif Pinnacle
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Who are Cardif Pinnacle

• Cardif Pinnacle are the British subsidiary to
  Cardif, the insurance arm of BNP Paribas.
• The French bank BNP Paribas is one of the Worlds
  largest banks
• Cardif Pinnacle has 750 employees and also has
  branches in Ireland and South Africa. EasyAsk is
  used in all three locations
• Established in 1971, Cardif Pinnacle is one of
  the UK's leading providers of creditor insurance
  and product warranties. In recent years the
  company has developed other product lines
  including Medical Cash Plans, Pet Healthcare and
  Personal Accident cover.
• Cardif Pinnacle also markets competitive, tax
  efficient investment products via IFAs and direct
  to the public and Financial Telemarketing
  Services provides contact centre and outsourcing
  services to leading Banks, Building Societies and
  Finance Houses.

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Why did we purchase EasyAsk?

• Cardif Pinnacle purchased EasyAsk along with a
  fast access data store Aruna to
• Overcome delays in reporting
• Rationalise reporting
• Give ownership of data to our business users
• Typical problems we faced before the introduction
  of EasyAsk were
• Reports running slowly and clogging up our
  systems
• Inefficient use of IT resource
• Users finding workarounds because they couldnt
  get their request done within an adequate time
  frame
• External clients and internal users becoming
  frustrated as we could not provide meaningful MI
  quickly
• Business users unable to adequately explain their
  business requirements to IT
• Data hidden and not properly understood by key
  people within the business

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EasyAsk Proof of Concept

• In 2003 we set what we considered to be a real
  challenge
• To transfer data to our new Aruna Date store,
  create the required EasyAsk dictionary and remove
  the top twenty five slowest running reports from
  our IT systems within a two month period.
• The challenge was met with plenty of time to
  spare!
• It also demonstrated previously un-thought of
  benefits such as
• Rationalising and simplifying our terms and
  definitions
• - Changing the way the organisation thinks
• Our Senior Finance Manager states
• EasyAsk helps us better understand our business
  and improve our processes

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EasyAsk and Aruna

• Aruna can integrate data from multiple databases
  and business applications, EasyAsk can cut and
  slice views of this in any way we wish
• 2. Aruna processes queries at super fast speeds
• 3. EasyAsk allows simple plain-language querying
• 4. Reports which took hours to run on our
  administration systems now run via Aruna and
  EasyAsk in seconds or minutes at the most
• The combination of Aruna and EasyAsk
• allows our business users to take ownership of
  information

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EasyAsk More than one natural way to query
For the one finger typist just point and click
and the table and field names get written for you
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EasyAsk Training and Support

• We provide full internal training for EasyAsk
  but it only takes an hour
• Hold users hand for one month - Then throw them
  into the sea!
• Email request box when they have real trouble
  swimming
• Turnaround time one day or less for simple
  requests five days for complex reports
• Many times faster than producing reports by other
  means
• If we do have to use IT then report specification
  defined by MI information analyst rather than
  ordinary user
• We currently have 130 users querying EasyAsk
• Support - around 30 hours per week

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EasyAsk Controlled Freedom

• EasyAsk can provide any level of security you
  require
• Some tips
• KISS
• Network groups, User groups, subject groups the
  business should decide IT should guide
• Some tables only available to some groups
• Some dictionaries only available to some groups
• Master updateable dictionary child dictionaries
  security setting for users to write queries or
  just run reports

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EasyAsk Keep the Wolves Happy

• Drivers for Change
• Legislation and the need to demonstrate corporate
  governance
• Internal and External demands for speed increase
  over time.
• Data and the demands for information - always
  more, never less!
• EasyAsk provides the flexibility to adapt to an
  ever changing corporate and global environment

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EasyAsk Sherlock Holmes Dr Watson

• You all have them those clever people who look
  at data in a different way, discover issues and
  recommend new ways to do business
• For Example
• Data Quality Issues
• Data Quality Measurement
• Data Mining
• Digital Dashboard
• Progress Developers use EasyAsk
• Interaction with other tools Excel for example
• EasyAsk has released the potential of our
  employees and empowered them in the use of data
  in a number of diverse and unexpected ways

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EasyAsk Excellent with Excel

• A big percentage of our user base use Excel
• EasyAsk displays like Excel and has many of the
  features of Excel
• Export to Excel sheet, or copy and paste
• Multiple sheets just like Excel so keep
  multiple queries
• Refresh sheet so you can update one or all
  queries on the fly
• The above allows monthly reporting at the click
  of a button rather than re-querying
• If you want your companys chief accountant to be
  your buddy introduce her / him to EasyAsk!

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EasyAsk Economies of Scale

• Many users teach one another
• No need for third party reporting tools
• EasyAsk can link to all systems
• One querying tool across the company saves time
  and money in regard to training, software costs,
  licence maintenance, IT support, software
  rollouts etc.
• Employees are able to move across the company
  more easily
• EasyAsk Easy Savings!

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EasyAsk MI/BI View of the World

• Data transformation - from a transactional to an
  analytical view data
• EasyAsk the perfect tool for working with a data
  warehouse
• Aruna a perfect fit with EasyAsk
• Digital Dashboard and KPIs
• Leverage and Control of MI and BI solutions
• Master Data Management
• EasyAsk helps us to control the flow of
  information and prevent proliferation of
  non-standard MI solutions

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EasyAsk Summary

• EasyAsk - Flexible
• EasyAsk - Natural
• EasyAsk - Scalable
• EasyAsk - Ownership
• EasyAsk - SQL Developer
• EasyAsk - Building Blocks
• EasyAsk - Easy Support
• EasyAsk - Controlled Freedom
• EasyAsk - Easy Investigations
• EasyAsk - Excellent Excel
• EasyAsk - Economies of Scale
• EasyAsk - Master Data Management

Hes still waiting for his report Im off to San
Francisco!