Fourteen Years of Steady Current

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

– Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison held more than 1,000 U.S. patents. In 1882, his Pearl Street Station in New York began delivering electric power to paying customers, and the world has been plugged in ever since.

One of America’s leading distributors of electrical, communications, and utility supplies keeps the world wired too. In 2012, it plugged in Nexus Query Chameleon, and the current hasn’t dropped since. Fourteen years later, its users still put in the perspiration, but Nexus supplies a lot of the inspiration. This partnership has never blown a fuse.

Teradata, DB2, and Oracle in One Tool

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”

– Michael Faraday, 1849

Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, the principle behind every electric generator. He proved that the right connection can turn motion into power.

This distributor runs Teradata, DB2, and Oracle, and Nexus connects to all three. It queries every system 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. A distributor knows exactly what is in every warehouse. With Nexus, its users know what is in every data warehouse too, and that’s a powerful connection.

Built to Keep Improving

“Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.”

– Thomas J. Watson Sr.

Thomas Watson Sr. renamed his company International Business Machines in 1924 and built it into IBM, with a one-word motto on the walls: THINK.

That is how we think about Nexus. After 14 years, we never consider the job done. Nexus keeps adding features, and every user gets every feature, with nothing extra to buy. For a company running DB2, quoting IBM’s founder feels right. With Nexus, the thinking never stops, and neither does the progress.

Here is what else is wired into Nexus.

Migrate Between All Systems

“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.”

– Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages with inventions, anatomy, and flying machines, many of them written backward in his famous mirror script.

Data shouldn’t sit still and rust either. 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 Snowflake, DB2 to BigQuery, Oracle to Databricks, or any system to any other. Leonardo wrote in reverse. Nexus moves your data forward.

The Nexus Server

“Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit.”

– Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph overcame polio as a child and wore a leg brace for years. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, she won three gold medals and was called the fastest woman in the world.

The Nexus Server is built for speed. 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. With the Nexus Server, your data runs like Wilma, and the PC never has to break a sweat.

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

“I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.”

– Mia Hamm

Mia Hamm won two Women’s World Cups and two Olympic gold medals with the U.S. national team, and she always gave the credit to her teammates.

The Super Join Builder is a team player too. Pick tables from Teradata, DB2, and Oracle, 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 plays its position, and every join is a goal.

Cloud Drop

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

– Benjamin Franklin, 1735

Benjamin Franklin flew a kite into a storm cloud in 1752 to prove that lightning is electricity. A distributor of electrical supplies owes him a thank-you note.

Cloud Drop sends your data into the clouds without the lightning. 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. Franklin needed a key and a kite. You just need a drag and a drop, and you’ll be healthy, wealthy, and wired.

GitHub Integration

“Measure twice, cut once.”

– Carpenter’s proverb

Every electrician and carpenter learns this rule on the first day. Check your work before you make a cut you can’t take back.

GitHub Integration lets your team check twice and commit once. 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. If somebody cuts the wrong wire, GitHub keeps the old circuit diagram.

Federated Notebooks

“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”

– John Tukey, 1977

John Tukey was a Princeton statistician who coined the word “bit” in 1947 and helped popularize the word “software.” He taught the world to explore data before drawing conclusions.

Federated Notebooks are built for exploring. 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. Tukey gave us the bit. Nexus Notebooks put every bit in its place.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“Colours are the deeds of light, its deeds and sufferings.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1810

Goethe wrote Faust, but he also spent years studying color and published his Theory of Colours in 1810.

BIcandy turns your data into color and light. 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. It lights up every result set without a single light switch.

More Than 100 Themes

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”

– Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton grew up as one of 12 children in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and built a career that includes thousands of songs, movies, and her own theme park.

If you don’t like the colors on your screen, Nexus lets you paint new ones. Choose from more than 100 themes, from Coffee and Northern Lights to Incandescent, a warm theme fit for a company that sells light bulbs. Nexus 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. With Nexus, your screen is always switched on.

Why Nexus Keeps Swinging

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”

– Hank Aaron

Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs in his career and broke Babe Ruth’s record in 1974 despite years of hateful letters and threats. He never stopped swinging.

Most vendor query tools only swing at one pitch: 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 Fortune 500 distributor has relied on it for 14 years across Teradata, DB2, and Oracle. Nexus keeps swinging on every system, and it keeps clearing the fence.

Get Plugged In

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

– Chinese proverb

This proverb has been passed down for generations, and it is as true for software as it is for orchards.

This distributor plugged into Nexus 14 years ago. Your second best time is now. 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. Plug in, power up, and see the light.

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.