What is Prism?

Prism is a software toolset that allows end users, power users, DBAs and IT personnel to build, manage and share business intelligence applications without the need to learn how to program, how to query, and how to perform database optimizations that support query intensive operations.

What can I do with Prism?

With Prism, users create dashboards, reports and guided analytics applications for business functions such as IT, sales, operations, marketing, finance, human resources or any other database backed system. Prism business intelligence applications are simple, xml compressed documents, and thus are easy to maintain and distribute.

What is required to deploy Prism?

Prism is downloads onto your desktop and is self deployable. It doesn’t require any specific infrastructure. Once installed it can connect to the available data sources and deliver BI applications within minutes after connecting to the data source. It self-discovers dimensions and measures and brings the data in-memory.

What is a Prism Business Intelligence Application?

Every Prism business intelligence application is stored in a Prism document, which is a container of data sources and widgets. Users can use business intelligence applications by opening Prism documents, which can be generated from a gallery, received from other users or just built from scratch for personal/team use. The goal of a Business Intelligence application is to display data in an orderly way that is self-explanatory. Data should be easy to understand and easy to personalize for the specific needs of end users. Prism business intelligence applications can present dashboards, reports, business presentations, ad-hoc tanalysis and anything else that involves information presentation and analytics.

What is the Prism Business Intelligence application structure?

Every Prism Business Intelligence Application is made up of:

Data Sources

InPrism, a Data Source represents a link that holds connectivity attributes to a physical data store such as an Excel spreadsheet, an OLAP cube or a database table/view.

Sheets

Sheets are visual containers of Widgets. They are the main area in which you create your business intelligence application visually with drag & drop operations.

Widgets

Widgets visualize and allow users to interact with information. Examples of widgets include pivots,charts, indicators, selectors, images, rich text boxes and hyper links.

Questions

Questions represent visual queries that represent more complex information flows (segmentations,intersections, unions and more).

See Also