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Jared Douglas
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Jared Douglas, Marketing Specialist at Progress DataDirect
CoffingDW had system-neutral software and a client list that included some of the biggest companies in the world. But, they were still searching for a way to query multiple systems from a single source. The Progress DataDirect solution gave the CoffingDW team the functionality they’d been looking for.
Not content to wait for the future to happen, Tom “Tera-Tom” Coffing founded Coffing Data Warehousing with the intention of bringing the data warehousing industry into the 21st century. For over 20 years, CoffingDW has been a leader in technical education with over 50 books in their library and over 1,000 classes that have reached millions of people the world over.
As reliance on data and data warehousing has grown across every industry, CoffingDW has remained at the center, now developing vendor- and hardware-neutral software with the ability to seamlessly fit into any enterprise. Their crowning achievement is the Nexus Query Chameleon, which aims to unite all databases and hardware through a single application at the desktop level.
That achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the powerful connectivity provided by Progress® DataDirect®.
CoffingDW is the creator of the Nexus Query Chameleon
The Nexus of all Data
The idea of seamlessly connecting and querying disparate data sources like Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, MongoDB and Hadoop has long been considered impossible. Where other organizations might throw their hands up, however, CoffingDW saw an opportunity. This was the genesis of the Nexus Query Chameleon project, which aims to give businesses the power to model, join, query, convert and move data between all their systems.
“Getting these machines talking to each other, that’s the blood flow of your entire operation,” explains Coffing.
Despite a clear vision and 15 years of development, Nexus was long missing the crucial piece that would enable the high-performance connectivity central to the application. Then, they found Progress DataDirect.
DataDirect Delivers
Coffing says it was either the DataDirect platform or nothing. “We talked to some of our Teradata counterparts and they said the only way to move data between Oracle, SQL Server and Teradata with the press of a button is DataDirect.”
Nexus has been 15 years in the making, but it only took two weeks to deploy the final piece of the puzzle, the DataDirect solution. “It just happened like magic,” explains Coffing. “And we were able to move data so unbelievably fast.” Projects that could take six weeks now take a single day to complete.
Thanks to DataDirect, Nexus Query Chameleon functions like nothing else. When the CoffingDW team showed their solution to top cloud providers, the audience was in disbelief. “They said, that’s not possible,” recalls Coffing. “We said, well you’re seeing it,”
Unparalleled Performance
Aside from the lower costs and time to market, ability to focus on product development (instead of maintenance) and support for unprecedented cross-system query functionality, DataDirect has enabled CoffingDW to create a product that couldn’t exist otherwise. According to Coffing, “The DataDirect solution has given us that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have the right product at the right time, during the right exact paradigm shift, to put us in a great position. So we’re very excited about the future.”
To hear the story straight from Tera-Tom himself, check out the following video. While you’re at it, head to our website to learn about our full suite of DataDirect connectors and reach out to us for a free trial.
Author information
Marketing Specialist, Progress DataDirect at Progress DataDirect
Jared Douglas is a marketing specialist at Progress® DataDirect®. Since earning his Bachelor's degree at North Carolina State University, Jared spends most of his time coordinating content for the Data Connections blog and talking about the latest and greatest from the world of data connectivity and integration. In his free time, he enjoys playing games, spending time outdoors and sampling beer from North Carolina’s many craft breweries.
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