Data Virtuality Platform Reviews & Product Details
"Highly reccomendable data warehouse solution"
What do you like best?
Having used Data Virtuality for the past 4.5 years, I can say that Data Virtuality is a solution that is both easy to learn and hard to master (in a positive way). The manner in which we have set up our data driven environment has been made possible through Data Virtuality. The logical data warehouse first enabled us to rapidly access and combine many separate data sources in an ad hoc manner and later, provided us with the tools to set up a well structured, fully featured data integration and data warehouse solution.
Data virtuality virtually takes in all data sources and enabled us to process that data for it to be published to any desired client tool, either via a ODBC or JDBC drivers or via the built-in REST service. The support team at Data Virtuality responds very fast and correct to any question and on more than one occasion has gone 'the extra mile' to satisfy our support needs.
What do you dislike?
Additional client tools like Tableau, Looker, Excel or PowerBI are a must for business users - it has proven difficult to learn these users to use SQL to extract data in a flexible manner. Data virtuality requires experience in and understanding of logical data warehouse design or training therein to most effectively use the power that the solution offers.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Ideally, set out a strategy/plan out from the beginning in terms of how to use data virtuality's flexibility to it's full potential (best practices can be delivered to you by the company).
Having trained personnel on board that know their way around data modeling data processing will help a great deal.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
At Springlane, we use Data virtuality for all things data. We integrate data from various data sources to be used company wide for reporting, analysis and forecasting.
Through the connection with many different data sources via one relatively simple query interface, we were first able to respond quickly to most questions that our organization had, by simply querying data for any of the connected systems in an ad hoc manner. This helped tremendously with building up our team as the go-to-source for data, more specifically 'the truth' regarding anything not easily found in application's front ends.
Data Virtuality's use of virtual schemas, powerful transformation and scheduling capabilities, combined with the best practices provides to us by the the support team, enabled us to undertake the next steps we needed to automate many, if not all of the data preparation we previously did manually and add many more features to boot. The virtual schemas support organizing our work, making it easier to share development over multiple developers and share and re-use created code. The transformation capabilities offered us the means to do without any external tools and truly have a single point of reference for our data related projects, whereas the scheduling ties this all together in automated nightly jobs.
"Data Virtuality is a powerful Logical Data Warehouse which I can strongly recommend"
What do you like best?
Working daily with DV I really enjoyed the virtual data layer. With the virtual data layer, we were able to save a lot of storage in the Logical Data Warehouse. It is very convenient to test the data before writing it into the DWH. Furthermore, I really like the DV ticket system and their support. Usually, the support-team gets back to you very quickly (latest within a day). In case of critical problems, they react immediately.
What do you dislike?
The client separation (multi-tenancy) is not very strong, but they are working on it.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I can strongly recommend Data Virtuality because of its strengths of Data Virtualisation and the distributed processes.It is quite easy to set-up and you can start within a day.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We as Invia use DV especially in the marketing department. DV is a great support for integrating over 30 data-sources. With DV we have a single point of truth, so everybody in the company has the same understanding of the data. The virtual data layer of DV allows us to make changes in the ETL-process on-the-fly without re-engineering the whole ETL-process. Since we implemented DV we save about 80% of the whole BI- and controlling resources in our marketing team. A Nice side effect, we were able to avoid Google Analytics Sampling (GA free version) by using DV procedures, which saved us a lot of money.
"Datawarehousing & centralization of data"
What do you like best?
One tool for datawarehousing and to connect and merge all company related data effortlessly. Very flexible job editor to schedule individual update jobs. Really fast, helpful and solution-oriented customer support.
What do you dislike?
The documentation is quite difficult to navigate and some things are missing. Would be great to have kind of a certification for Data Virtuality. Also some kind of introduction tutorial videos would be greate.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The Power of Data Virtuality comes with the connectors. If you have various data sources and want to combine this data, this is a really greate tool to do so.
Do not hesitate to use the customer support if you have any questions or if you come to a point where you dont know how to go on. They are always open for your questions, have good advices and will help you.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We are using Data Virtuality as Data Warehouse in which we integrate all company related data. We use different connectors in order to do so.
"Powerful data hub supporting stored procedures in SQL"
What do you like best?
We have partnered with Data Virtuality since 2016 and use the software as the central data hub in our business intelligence projects. In the first phase of our projects we connect to our clients' data sources. That takes only a couple of minutes and we can immediately proceed to start building dashboards. Its the enabler for ad hoc reporting and rapid prototyping.
The strength over other ETL tools are the pre-built connectors which cut down time for data access to minutes - and the virtual data layer. The concept of a virtual data layer that supports sophisticated SQL procedures is a game changer in the industry.
What do you dislike?
Time to onboard. We use the software in a way no other ETL tool operates. That required a rethinking to better fit our company.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Take the free trial and test the support\partner connections to get a feel for what DV can do.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Quick Data Access
Rapid BI prototyping
Ad hoc reporting
Automating data work flows utilizing stored procedures
Cutting time to access data to a matter of minutes
Have a central data hub to describe the business logic
"Integrating marketing data sources for campaign management and attribution"
What do you like best?
The best and unique thing is really that Data Virtuality is fully SQL based which gives us full flexibility when working with our data other marketing integration pipeline tools could not provide us with.
First, we connected our marketing partner sources. Data Virtuality has many connectors, so our facebook, linkedin, twitter, google ad, analytics and MySQL database was connected within 1,5h. Once we did this, we had access to the full API and could model and transform the data with SQL. That is really a game changer, because other marketing integration solutions only let us select from templates, where we always ran into limitations when building an attribution model.
We have also stored a lot of SQL code that defines how our marketing data flows on Data Virtuality. It's basically the data brain behind our marketing operations.
What do you dislike?
Most advantages come with a disadvantage. Here, the price of flexibility comes with the fact that you need to know SQL well.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Overall, we're very happy with it. It is a very sophisticated software that comes with a variety of features that helped us to build our marketing analytics stack and bring our infrastructure to the next level (coming from having tested a couple of dozen data pipeline tools out there)
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Marketing Data Analytics. Marketing Attribution. eMail Campaign Management. Website Analytics
"Used Data Virtuality at my last 2 companies as reporting back-end."
What do you like best?
I am consulting with high-growth startups that usually start with a clean sheet when it comes to Business Intelligence, but quickly need to set up an infrastructure for reporting and analytics for marketing, sales and operations.
Best about Data Virtuality is the large number of connectors to access data sources. It saves me time on the integration part and let's me focus on working on the logic behind the numbers.
Another important part is that I can pull all data, also custom fields for example for Salesforce. I can set up the specific business logic my clients need instead of just using templates for integration.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes I get error messages that are not self-explaining for me.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Single source of data for Business Intelligence tools. With Data Virtuality I can access data sources and build out the business logic to use data viz tools like Excel, Tableau and Metabase for visualization.
"Data Virtuality is the core of our reporting infrastructure feeding Tableau with data for reporting"
What do you like best?
I am using Data Virtuality for 3 years now. The best about Data Virtuality is that it enables me, a non technical user, to access our client data sources and build reportings in a very short time completely autonomously. Previously, I needed developers to access our client data which took several weeks and did not always work. Support is also helpful.
What do you dislike?
The desktop frontend looks a bit dated for me. The web frontend introduced in 2.1 looks very promising for the future.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I recommend using the 14 day test phase to see for yourself how fast it helps you to centralize your data.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Reporting for clients: Connecting to several APIs and databases on client side. Mostly Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Web Shop Data (Magento), MS SQL Server and MongoDB. Visualization with Tableau and automatically sending reports via email.
