If You Build It

“If you build it, he will come.”

– Field of Dreams, 1989

Field of Dreams was filmed in a cornfield near Dyersville, Iowa, and the ballfield is still there. In 2021, Major League Baseball built a stadium next to it, and the Yankees and White Sox walked out of the corn to play a real game.

A state government in the heartland built something too. In 2013, it brought in Nexus Query Chameleon, and its users have been coming back to it every day since. That was 13 years ago, and the partnership is still growing like corn in July. They built it, they came, and they never left the field.

They Switched Warehouses. They Kept Nexus.

“Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy.”

– Dan Gable

Dan Gable won Olympic gold in 1972 without giving up a single point, then coached the Iowa Hawkeyes to 15 NCAA team titles. In the heartland, wrestling isn’t a sport. It’s a way of life.

This agency was a large Teradata shop for years, and then it made a big move to Google BigQuery. A warehouse change like that usually takes the tools down with it. Not this time. The agency kept Nexus, so its users never had to learn a new query tool. The warehouse changed, the query tool didn’t, and that’s a reversal that scores. When you’ve got Nexus in your corner, every switch is a takedown.

Know the Bytes Before You Bite

“Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”

– Herbert Hoover, 1936

Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, in 1874, and he remains the only president born in the state. He also had a dry sense of humor about government spending.

In BigQuery, on-demand queries are billed by the bytes they process, so one careless SELECT * can cost real taxpayer dollars. 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. With Nexus, the young won’t inherit your query bill.

One Tool for Every System

“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.”

– George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver earned his bachelor’s degree at Iowa State in 1894 and became its first Black faculty member. He went on to find more than 300 uses for the peanut.

Nexus is the key that unlocks every database door. It queries BigQuery, Teradata, 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. Carver found 300 uses for a peanut. Nexus users find new uses for their data every day, and that’s no small potatoes.

Here is what else this agency harvests with Nexus.

Migrate Between All Systems

“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”

– Ann Landers

Ann Landers and her twin sister, Dear Abby, were born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1918. For decades, the two of them answered America’s questions in newspapers read by tens of millions of people.

Dear Ann: My data is stuck on Teradata, and my heart is set on BigQuery. What should I do? Signed, Ready to Move. Dear Ready: 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, Oracle to Snowflake, or any system to any other. The hard work is disguised as one click, and the advice column practically writes itself.

The Nexus Server

“I will never put my name on a product that does not have in it the best that is in me.”

– John Deere

In 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere built a steel plow that could cut through the sticky prairie soil. His name now rides on the green-and-yellow tractors that work fields across the heartland.

The Nexus Server is the tractor of data movement. 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. Nothing runs like a Deere, except a Nexus Server plowing through data.

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

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

– Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls, and he never won one until he learned to trust his teammates.

The Super Join Builder is all teamwork. 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. Every system brings its talent, and Nexus brings the championship.

Cloud Drop

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words as pioneer wagons were rolling west across the prairie. He was telling Americans to aim high.

Cloud Drop lets you hitch your data to the cloud. 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. The pioneers needed wagons. Your data just needs a drag and a drop.

GitHub Integration

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

– Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra won 10 World Series championships with the Yankees, and he made common sense sound like poetry.

GitHub Integration lets your team watch every change. 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. You can observe a lot by just watching, and with GitHub, you can see exactly who hit it out of the park.

Federated Notebooks

“It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in Burr Oak, Iowa, as a girl, and she later wrote the Little House books about growing up on the prairie.

Federated Notebooks keep analysis sweet and simple. 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 thinking written right beside the code. Call it the little notebook on the prairie.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

– Old English proverb

That proverb has been around for about 400 years. It means you don’t know how good something is until you try it.

BIcandy is the proof. 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 county or city. There’s no dragging, no dropping, and no separate BI tool. It’s sweeter than a corn dog at the state fair.

More Than 100 Themes

“All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”

– Grant Wood

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930, using a little farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa, as the backdrop. It became one of the most famous paintings in America.

Nexus gives you more than 100 themes, from Coffee and Northern Lights to Ann Arbor Maize and Blue. 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. Your good ideas can come while you’re milking your data, and your screen won’t look like American Gothic.

Why Nexus Catches Excellence

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

– Vince Lombardi

Vince Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers to victories in the first two Super Bowls, and the Super Bowl trophy now carries his name.

Most vendor query tools only chase one 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 heartland state has relied on it for 13 years, through a complete change of data warehouse. Nexus chases perfection on every system, and it catches excellence every time.

Plant Your Field of Dreams

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

– Will Rogers

Will Rogers was a cowboy, a humorist, and one of the most popular entertainers of the 1920s and 1930s. He had a way of saying hard truths with a smile.

So don’t just sit there. 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. Is this heaven? No, it’s 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.