Six Years in the Neighborhood

“Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

– Fred Rogers

Fred Rogers taped Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in Pittsburgh for more than 30 years, and generations of children grew up with his cardigan, his sneakers, and his calm voice. The line came from his mother, who told him to look for the helpers whenever the news was scary.

In 2020, one of Pittsburgh’s great health and wellness companies found a helper of its own: Nexus Query Chameleon. Six years later, Nexus is still in the neighborhood, helping its people query, move, and understand their data every day. It’s a beautiful day in the data neighborhood, and Nexus is happy to be their neighbor.

Follow the Yellowbrick Road

“There’s no place like home.”

– Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, 1939

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy follows the yellow brick road all the way to the Emerald City, only to learn that the power to get home was with her the whole time.

This company followed its own Yellowbrick road. For years, it ran a large Yellowbrick system and a large Teradata system. Then it clicked its heels and moved to Google BigQuery. Two warehouses went out, one cloud came in, and through it all, the company kept Nexus. Its users never had to learn a new query tool. The warehouses changed, but for this team, there’s no place like Nexus.

Know the Bytes Before You Bite

“Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves.”

– Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh into the largest steel company in the world, sold it in 1901 for about $480 million, and then gave most of his fortune away, including the money for more than 2,500 libraries.

In BigQuery, on-demand queries are billed by the bytes they process, so one careless SELECT * can run up real costs. Nexus shows how many bytes a BigQuery query will process before you run it. Trim the columns, add a WHERE clause, and watch the number drop before a single byte is billed. Carnegie watched every ton of steel. Nexus watches every byte, and that’s a steel of a deal.

One Tool for Every System

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.”

– Roberto Clemente

Roberto Clemente played 18 seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, won 12 Gold Gloves, and got his 3,000th hit with the last regular-season at-bat of his career. He died in 1972 while flying relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

Nexus makes a difference by connecting to every system. It queries BigQuery, Teradata, Yellowbrick, Oracle, SQL Server, Snowflake, and more from one tool, opening a tab for each system and joining the result sets together. The Cache Tree searches every connected system at once for a table or column name. Clemente got 3,000 hits. Nexus users get the right hit on the first search.

Here is what else makes this partnership Steel City strong.

Migrate Between All Systems

“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

– Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh, and its success was announced in 1955. He turned the hope of millions of parents into reality.

Moving to the cloud takes the same kind of courage. With Nexus, you 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 BigQuery, Yellowbrick to BigQuery, or any system to any other. Pittsburgh has three rivers, and with Nexus, all of your data flows the same direction.

The Nexus Server

“If someday they say of me that in my work I have contributed something to the welfare and happiness of my fellow man, I shall be satisfied.”

– George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse built his company in Pittsburgh and championed alternating current in the famous “War of the Currents.” His AC power system lit up the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

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 and stores flat files cheaply so users can query them like tables. Westinghouse won the War of the Currents. The Nexus Server wins the war on bottlenecks, and it keeps your data current.

Drag, Drop and Done

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

– Henry Ford, 1922

In 1913, Henry Ford’s moving assembly line cut the time to build a Model T chassis from more than 12 hours to about an hour and a half. He did it by breaking one big job into many small ones.

Nexus does the same for moving data. Users love that they can take any result set, drag it onto any system in the tree, and drop it. Nexus creates the table and moves the data with high-speed utilities. One drag, and the assembly line runs itself. Any color you want, as long as it’s a table.

Super Join Builder: Federation Across All Systems

“Champions are champions not because they do anything extraordinary, but because they do the ordinary things better than anyone else.”

– Chuck Noll

Chuck Noll coached the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl titles in six seasons, from 1975 through 1980, with the famous Steel Curtain defense.

The Super Join Builder does the ordinary things better than anyone else. Pick tables from BigQuery, Teradata, Oracle, 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. Noll built the Steel Curtain. Nexus builds the steel join.

Cloud Drop

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

– Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson grew up just outside Pittsburgh, and her 1962 book Silent Spring helped launch the modern environmental movement.

Cloud Drop lets you look up at the clouds and put them to work. 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 Google Cloud Storage and join it to BigQuery. Pittsburgh’s own Gene Kelly went singin’ in the rain. With Cloud Drop, you’ll be singin’ in the cloud.

GitHub Integration

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

– Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra won 10 World Series championships with the Yankees, but Pittsburgh fans remember one he lost. In Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run sailed over the left-field wall while Yogi watched it go.

GitHub Integration makes sure your best work never sails away. 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. When last year’s query comes back, it’s déjà vu all over again, and this time it’s a walk-off win.

Federated Notebooks

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

– Herbert A. Simon, 1971

Herbert Simon spent his career at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He helped create one of the first artificial intelligence programs in 1956 and won both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Federated Notebooks help analysts focus. Mix SQL, Python, Markdown, and more in one connected workflow. One cell queries BigQuery, the next queries Oracle, and Python brings the results together, with the reasoning written right beside the code. A wealth of information finally gets the attention it deserves, and nobody’s focus goes bankrupt.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.”

– H. J. Heinz

Henry John Heinz founded his food company in Pittsburgh in 1869, and his “57 Varieties” slogan made his ketchup famous around the world.

BIcandy does a common thing uncommonly well. 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. Your competitors will be trying to ketchup.

More Than 100 Themes

“Art is what you can get away with.”

– Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and turned a can of soup into one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century.

Nexus gives you more than 100 themes, including one made for this city: 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. Set Pittsburgh Black and Gold to arrive at 4:00, and you’ll know it’s almost time to head home. Warhol made art out of soup cans. Nexus makes art out of SQL, and you can get away with it every day.

Why Nexus Is Built Like Steel

“The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.”

– Arnold Palmer

Arnold Palmer grew up in Latrobe, just east of Pittsburgh, won seven major championships, and brought golf to millions of new fans who called themselves Arnie’s Army.

Most vendor query tools only play one course: 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 Steel City health leader has relied on it for six years, through a complete change of data warehouses. On every system, Nexus hits the green in regulation.

Join the Neighborhood

“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”

– Lou Holtz

Lou Holtz grew up in the Ohio River valley just downstream from Pittsburgh and coached Notre Dame to the 1988 national championship.

You have the ability, and we hope this story gave you the motivation. 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. Won’t you be our neighbor?

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.