Fifteen Years at a Steady Pace

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

– Aesop, The Tortoise and the Hare

Aesop told the story of the tortoise and the hare about 2,500 years ago. The hare raced ahead, took a nap, and lost. The tortoise just kept going, and it is still winning races in storybooks today.

A health insurer with both a cross and a shield in its name has been our tortoise. It started with Nexus Query Chameleon in 2011, and it has kept the same steady pace for 15 years. No flashy sprints, no naps, just a partnership that keeps crossing the finish line. Plenty of query tools have hopped in and out of the race since then. Nexus is still in the shell game, and it’s winning.

Small Team, Big Partnership

“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

– Sir William Osler

Sir William Osler was one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889, and he changed medical training by bringing students to the bedside. He believed in treating people, not just problems.

That is how we treat this customer. Every user gets the same care, from the seasoned DBA to the analyst who started last week. We don’t just fix a bug and leave; we take care of the people who use Nexus every day. After 15 years, the diagnosis is clear: this partnership has a clean bill of health.

One Tool for Every System

“One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.”

– Sir Alexander Fleming

In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from vacation to find mold growing in one of his petri dishes, and it was killing the bacteria around it. That accident gave the world penicillin and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1945.

Nexus helps users find what they are looking for, and sometimes what they didn’t know they had. This insurer runs mostly on Teradata and Oracle, and now Snowflake too. Nexus queries all of them 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. Fleming needed a moldy dish to make his discovery. With Nexus, your data never gets that old.

Here is what keeps this partnership in great shape.

Migrate Between All Systems

“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”

– Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, including one in the 4×100-meter relay. In a relay, the race is won or lost in the handoff.

When this insurer moved data to Snowflake, it used Nexus to make every handoff clean. 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, Oracle to Snowflake, or any system to any other: every table crosses the finish line. In this relay, nobody drops the baton.

Super Join Builder: Federation Across All Systems

“You must never so much as think whether you like it or not, whether it is bearable or not; you must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.”

– Clara Barton

Clara Barton nursed soldiers on Civil War battlefields and founded the American Red Cross in 1881. She brought help together from everywhere and sent it where it was needed most.

The Super Join Builder brings tables together from everywhere. Check the columns you want from tables on Teradata, Oracle, Snowflake, and more, and Nexus writes the SQL, moves the data to a hub, and joins it there. Pick a different hub, and Nexus rewrites the SQL. Clara Barton had her Red Cross. This customer has a different color of cross, and a shield to go with it, and Nexus joins them all.

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

“There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

– Jonas Salk, 1955

Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine, announced in 1955. When Edward R. Murrow asked who owned the patent, Salk gave this famous answer and gave his vaccine to the world.

Nobody owns the cloud either, but Cloud Drop puts it to work for you. 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. You can’t patent the sun, but with Cloud Drop, every cloud has a sunny side.

GitHub Integration

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

– Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra won 10 World Series championships with the Yankees, and his “Yogi-isms” made him one of the most quoted people in America. He made saying things twice sound brilliant.

With GitHub Integration, saying it twice is the whole idea. 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 your team needs last month’s query, it’s déjà vu all over again, but this time it runs on the first try.

Federated Notebooks

“In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”

– Louis Pasteur, 1854

Louis Pasteur gave us pasteurization and the rabies vaccine, and he recorded his experiments in detailed laboratory notebooks that his family kept private for decades after his death.

Federated Notebooks keep your work prepared and your thinking on the record. Mix SQL, Python, Markdown, and more in one connected workflow. One cell queries Teradata, the next queries Oracle, a third queries Snowflake, and Python brings the results together. Pasteur kept his notebooks private. Yours can be shared with the whole team, fully pasteurized and safe to consume.

BIcandy: Instant Dashboards and Beautiful Maps

“I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.”

– Florence Nightingale, 1860

Florence Nightingale is famous as the founder of modern nursing, but she was also a gifted statistician. In 1858, she created a now-famous chart that showed far more soldiers were dying from disease than from battle wounds, and it helped change hospital care forever.

BIcandy carries on her tradition of letting the picture tell the story. 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. Florence lit the way with a lamp. BIcandy lights it up with a dashboard.

More Than 100 Themes

“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”

– Pablo Picasso

From 1901 to 1904, Pablo Picasso painted almost everything in shades of blue. Art historians call it his Blue Period, and those paintings now hang in the world’s great museums.

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. Picasso had one Blue Period. With Nexus, every period of the day gets its own color.

Why Nexus Is in Fighting Shape

“I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

– Muhammad Ali, 1974

Muhammad Ali said it before the “Rumble in the Jungle,” where he won back the heavyweight title from George Foreman. He went on to become the first three-time heavyweight champion.

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 health insurer with a cross and a shield in its name has relied on it for 15 years. Nexus is so strong on every database, it makes single-system tools feel sick.

Your Daily Dose of Nexus

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

– Old proverb

The saying goes back to an old Welsh proverb from the 1860s, and it has been reminding people to take care of themselves ever since.

Take care of your data the same way. 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. A demo a day keeps the headaches away, and this prescription comes with no side effects.

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.