Five Years of Positive Charge

“Don’t be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful.”

– Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit in 1959 and later co-founded Intel. People called him the Mayor of Silicon Valley, and he spent his life telling engineers to stop looking back and start building.

One of the world’s great semiconductor companies took that advice. With roots in the Netherlands, its chips help power cars, phones, and contactless payments around the globe. Five years ago, it went off and did something wonderful: it chose Nexus Query Chameleon. It runs Teradata, Oracle, and now Databricks, and Nexus has been wired into all of them. After five years, this partnership is a real chip off the old block, and it’s still fully charged.

The Query That Paid for Itself

“Remember that time is money.”

– Benjamin Franklin, 1748

Benjamin Franklin wrote those words in his Advice to a Young Tradesman, and he went on to become the face on the $100 bill. Nobody understood the value of time and money better.

This chipmaker had a query on Teradata that took four hours to run. Running it over and over, every time an analyst had a new question, would have burned time and money on the warehouse. So the company bought a Nexus Server and let it do the heavy lifting. The Nexus Server ran the four-hour query once and saved the results to a MySQL system. Then the analysts ran their analysis against MySQL as often as they liked. Franklin said time is money. This team saved both, and that adds up to a lot of Benjamins.

Value Is What You Get

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

– Warren Buffett, 2008

Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the most valuable companies in the world, and his annual letters are read like scripture by investors. People call him the Oracle of Omaha.

This company runs a different Oracle, plus Teradata and Databricks, and Nexus gets maximum value from all three. The expensive work runs once on the warehouse, and the everyday questions run on a less expensive system. That is the kind of investment Buffett would love: you pay for the query once, and the value keeps compounding. Turns out Nexus is an Oracle of savings, too.

One Tool for Every System

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

– Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak hand-built the Apple I in 1976 and designed the Apple II, the computer that brought personal computing into homes and schools. He has always had a sense of humor about technology.

Nexus queries Teradata, Oracle, Databricks, MySQL, and more from one tool. Each system opens in its own tab, and Nexus can join the result sets together. The Cache Tree searches every connected system at once for a table or column name. With a tab for every system, nobody has to throw anything out a window, not even Windows.

Here is what else powers this partnership.

Migrate Between All Systems

“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

– Jim Lovell, Apollo 13, 1970

Jim Lovell commanded Apollo 13 when an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon. His crew and NASA’s engineers improvised a way home, and all three astronauts returned safely.

Moving data between systems doesn’t have to be a space emergency. Check the tables, pick a target, and click Execute. Nexus builds the target tables, pairs the source vendor’s export utility with the target vendor’s load utility, and moves the data at full speed. Teradata to Databricks, Oracle to Databricks, or any system to any other: every table splashes down safely. With Nexus, Houston, we have no problem.

Super Join Builder: Federation Across All Systems

“Football is simple, but the hardest thing is to play simple football.”

– Clara Barton

Johan Cruyff, the Dutch master of “Total Football,” won the Ballon d’Or three times. His teams moved as one, with every player able to play every position.

The Super Join Builder is total federation. Pick tables from Teradata, Oracle, Databricks, and more, check the columns you want, and Nexus writes the SQL, moves the data to a hub, and joins it there. Pick a different hub, and Nexus rewrites the SQL. Cruyff made the hard game look simple. The Super Join Builder makes the hard join look simple, and every table scores.

The Nexus Server

“The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.”

– Sir Roger Bannister

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first mile in under four minutes, finishing in 3:59.4. Experts had said the human body could not do it.

When a migration runs from a desktop, every row squeezes through the user’s PC, and the effort gets painful fast. The Nexus Server moves data straight from source to target while the PC only sends the instructions. It also speeds up federated queries and stores flat files cheaply so users can query them like tables. Bannister broke the four-minute mile. The Nexus Server breaks the bottleneck.

Cloud Drop

“We are made of star-stuff.”

– Carl Sagan, 1980

Carl Sagan brought the universe into living rooms with his 1980 series Cosmos, and he helped create the Golden Record that flew aboard the Voyager spacecraft.

Cloud Drop launches your data into the sky. 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 any system. Your data may be made of bits and bytes, but with Cloud Drop, it’s pure star-stuff.

GitHub Integration

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”

– Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975

Edsger Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist who invented the famous shortest-path algorithm in 1956 and won the Turing Award in 1972. He also wrote the legendary 1968 letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.”

GitHub Integration keeps your SQL simple and reliable. 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 any system. Dijkstra considered GO TO harmful, but he never said anything bad about Go To GitHub.

Federated Notebooks

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

– Richard Feynman, 1974

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. In 1986, he dropped a piece of O-ring rubber into a glass of ice water at a televised hearing and showed the world why the Space Shuttle Challenger failed.

Federated Notebooks keep analysts honest. Mix SQL, Python, Markdown, and more in one connected workflow. One cell queries Teradata, the next queries Oracle, and Python brings the results together, with the reasoning written right beside the code. Feynman needed a glass of ice water to prove his point. With Nexus Notebooks, the proof is already on the page.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.”

– M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher was a Dutch artist famous for staircases that never end and patterns that fit together perfectly. He turned impossible ideas into beautiful order.

BIcandy turns the chaos of a result set into order. 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. Escher drew stairs that go nowhere. BIcandy builds dashboards that take you right where you need to go.

More Than 100 Themes

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”

– Wassily Kandinsky, 1911

Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstract art, and he believed colors could be heard like music. To him, yellow sang and blue played like a cello.

Nexus gives you more than 100 themes, 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. Kandinsky heard music in color. With Nexus, your screen plays a new tune every hour.

Why Nexus Is Built to Win

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing.”

– Pelé

Pelé won three World Cups with Brazil, in 1958, 1962, and 1970, and became the most famous athlete on the planet. He made the impossible look like play.

Most vendor query tools only work on their own system: Snowsight on Snowflake, BigQuery Studio on BigQuery, and the Databricks SQL Editor on Databricks. Nexus works equally well on every system it connects to. Microsoft OEM’d Nexus from 2009 to 2012 and gave it to its customers, and a global chipmaker has run it for five years. Nexus’s success is no accident either. It’s built on hard work, and it scores on every field.

Plug In to Nexus

“Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”

– Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra won 10 World Series championships with the Yankees and gave America some of its most lovable math.

Here’s our math. Ask for a 30-minute demo, and we’ll run Nexus on your own systems with the queries your team runs every day. If you’d rather try it yourself, ask for a free trial. The demo is ninety percent of the decision. The other half is how much money you’ll save.

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.