Out of the Browser

“The medium is the message.”

– Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian thinker who coined the phrase “global village” and argued in 1964 that the tool you use shapes your work as much as the work itself.

One of America’s largest financial and insurance companies proved him right. When it moved its data to Snowflake and Databricks, both platforms came with web pages for writing SQL. But hundreds of its analysts chose a different medium: Nexus Query Chameleon. They query Snowflake and Databricks from Nexus, they federate them together, and they never wait on a browser that just logged them out. The medium is the message, and the message is clear: close the browser.

Snowflake and Databricks, the Nexus Way

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke, 1973

Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in 1945 he described the communications satellites that now circle the Earth. He knew magic when he saw it.

A browser gives you one system at a time. Nexus gives you every system at once. Users connect to Snowflake and Databricks, along with Teradata, Oracle, Redshift, SQL Server, and more, in one tool. Each system opens in its own tab, and Nexus can join the result sets together. The Cache Tree searches every system at once for a table or column name. Some users here have 15 connections. Try keeping 15 browser tabs logged in. With Nexus, it’s not magic. It just looks that way.

Federate Snowflake and Databricks

“E pluribus unum.”

– Motto on the Great Seal of the United States, 1782

E pluribus unum means “Out of many, one.” It has been on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and you’ll find it on every quarter in your pocket.

The Super Join Builder lives by that motto. Pick tables from Snowflake and Databricks, check the columns you want, and Nexus writes the SQL, moves the data to a hub, and joins it there. Pick a different hub, such as your PC or a Nexus Server, and Nexus rewrites the SQL for you. Neither browser can join across the other’s system. Out of many systems, Nexus makes one answer, and it’s worth more than two bits.

Drag a Result Set to Any System

“Make it so.”

– Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Patrick Stewart played Captain Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994. When he gave an order, he didn’t explain how. He just said three words, and the crew made it happen.

This is the feature these users love most. They run a query, take the result set, and drag it onto any system in the tree, whether it’s Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or anything else. Nexus creates the table, picks the right data types, and moves the data with high-speed load utilities. No CREATE TABLE to write, no export file to babysit, and no browser upload limits. Drag it, drop it, and Nexus makes it so. Engage!

Connections Set Up for Everyone

“The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.”

– Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and wrote the very first web browser a year later. Even the father of the browser knew that connections are really about people.

These users asked for a way to share connections, and we built it. One person creates all of the Nexus connections and saves them to a file. Everyone else loads Nexus, and the connections are already there. Each user only fills in their own username and password. One file connects hundreds of people, and nobody has to bookmark a thing.

The Migration That Got Them Here

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

– Old proverb

The saying goes back to medieval France, and it has reminded builders for centuries that big things take time and teamwork.

This company’s move to the cloud wasn’t built in a day either. Twelve employees used three Nexus Servers to move its data off Teradata, Netezza, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server, and onto Snowflake, Databricks, and Redshift. Nexus pairs each source vendor’s export utility with each target vendor’s load utility and moves the data at full speed. Rome took centuries. This team just needed a dozen people and three servers.

The Nexus Server

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

– General George S. Patton

General George Patton led the U.S. Third Army in a lightning-fast drive across France in 1944. He believed in moving now.

The Nexus Server executes now. When a migration runs from a desktop, every row squeezes through the user’s PC. The Nexus Server moves data straight from source to target while the PC only sends the instructions. It also speeds up federated queries between Snowflake and Databricks, and it stores flat files cheaply so users can query them like tables. Patton raced across France. The Nexus Server races across clouds.

Cloud Drop

“You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing.”

– Chuck Yeager

Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound in 1947, in a plane he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife.

Cloud Drop breaks a barrier of its own. Drag any query result into AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or local storage, and it lands as a CSV, JSON, Parquet, Excel, or text file. Nexus shows cloud buckets like databases and files like tables, so users can query a file in the cloud and join it to Snowflake or Databricks. Yeager broke the sound barrier. Cloud Drop breaks the browser barrier.

GitHub Integration

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

– Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which taught the world that the answer to everything is 42. He was famous for missing deadlines.

GitHub Integration helps your team hit theirs. Push, pull, and manage SQL files directly between Nexus and GitHub, and every version is saved. Click a .sql file in the repo, and it opens as a query, ready to run on Snowflake, Databricks, or any other system. No more SQL lost in a browser worksheet called “Untitled 37.” Don’t panic. Your queries are safe.

Federated Notebooks

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

– Stephen Hawking, 2012

Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time in 1988 and spent his life explaining the universe to everyone, not just physicists.

Federated Notebooks are made for curious analysts. Mix SQL, Python, Markdown, and more in one connected workflow. One cell queries Snowflake, the next queries Databricks, and Python brings the results together, with the reasoning written right beside the code. It’s a brief history of your analysis, and anyone can follow it.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“Above all else show the data.”

– Edward Tufte, 1983

Edward Tufte is a Yale professor whose books on charts made him famous, and The New York Times once called him the da Vinci of data.

BIcandy follows his advice. Run a query that returns a date and an amount, and Nexus builds the dashboard for you: totals by year, month, weekday, and hour, plus maps where the size of each circle shows the amount in each city. There’s no dragging, no dropping, and no separate BI tool. Tufte would approve, and there’s not a chartjunk cookie in sight.

More Than 100 Themes

“The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you.”

– Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel made the little black dress a classic in 1926 and changed how the world thought about fashion.

Nexus has more than 100 themes, so every user can find the one that looks good on them, from Coffee and Northern Lights to Pittsburgh Black and Gold. It is also the only query tool that lets you schedule your themes: change them by the clock, rotate through your favorites, or go light by day and dark at night. A browser gives you one look. Nexus gives you a whole wardrobe, including the little black theme.

Why Nexus Is in the Arena

“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Theodore Roosevelt gave his famous “Man in the Arena” speech in Paris in 1910, and leaders have quoted it ever since.

Most vendor query tools stay in their own arena: the Snowflake web UI on Snowflake, the Databricks SQL Editor on Databricks, and BigQuery Studio on BigQuery. Nexus steps into every arena and works equally well on all of them. Microsoft OEM’d Nexus from 2009 to 2012 and gave it to its customers, and one of America’s largest financial and insurance companies relies on it every day. The browser can watch from the stands. Nexus is on the field.

Take the Fork

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

– Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra won 10 World Series championships with the Yankees, and his advice still makes perfect sense, even when it doesn’t.

You’re at the fork: the browser or Nexus. Ask for a 30-minute demo, and we’ll run Nexus on your own Snowflake and Databricks systems with the queries your team runs every day. If you’d rather try it yourself, ask for a free trial. Close the browser, open the data, and take the road to Nexus.

Email Tom Coffing at Tom.Coffing@CoffingDW.com and put “Nexus demo” or “Nexus trial” in the subject line.

Nexus Query Chameleon: The Intersection of All Data.