This blog provides the Q&A portion of our December 2020 webinar, “Boost Your Apps with BI Using the Bold BI^® Embed SDK.” The webinar is presented by Bold BI Product Manager Rajendran SP. A recording of the webinar is embedded below.

Q: Are there filter controls for the dashboards?

A: Yes, we have six filter widgets in the Bold BI designer: list box, combo box, range slider, date picker, period over period, and range navigation.

With the embedding use case, you can pass external filters for the dashboard directly using the Embedded SDK. For more details, please refer to the documentation available at this link.

Q: Can you dynamically change a web API data source?

A: We can use dashboard parameters to dynamically change a web API data source.

https://help.boldbi.com/embedded-bi/working-with-data-source/configuring-dashboard-parameters/

You can also refer to this previous webinar for more information: Webinar.

Q: How can I download this report?

A: Embedded SDK showcase samples are available at this location.

Regarding the appointment planner sample, we will soon be hosting it with the other showcase samples linked above. The original appointment planner app is available in our EJ2 showcase samples.

You can find the property management dashboard that I used for my demo under the sample dashboards we ship with the product.

In Bold BI On-Premises, you can find the sample dashboard in create dashboard.

In Bold BI Cloud, you can access it by clicking question mark icon (Explore option) and navigate to sample dashboards.

Q: How does embedding work?

A: You can find the workflow of how embedding works with Bold BI at the following link: Embedding SDK Workflow.

Basically, we provide a JavaScript library that allows you to load Bold BI dashboards within your application.

For allowing/authorizing the embedding of your Bold BI dashboard, you will be required to implement the authorization server that acts as a bridge between Bold BI and your app. In the webinar, we used the embed secret uniquely generated for your Bold BI server to validate and allow embedding.

Q: Can we use this in Blazor server apps?

A: Yes, you can use it in Blazor server apps.

• Sample
• Documentation

Q: Are there code samples with .NET Core MVC?

A: Yes, you can access the embedding samples at the following links:

• Embedding SDK Samples
• Embedded SDK Showcase Samples

Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

What is a digital dashboard?

A digital dashboard is a graphical user interface for visualizing aggregated data from various data sources, such as physical files, web services, and SQL databases. A digital dashboard allows you to make the right business decisions by monitoring the metrics of your business performance.

As your data grows day by day, it’s difficult to monitor all of it, and even more difficult to monitor it in a way that leads to improved business performance. This is where a digital dashboard can be useful to visualize your data into meaningful insights, historical trends, and real-time information using different KPIs.

To create your own business dashboard, refer to this blog post: 10 Great Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples.

How does a digital dashboard help you make the right business decisions?

Making the right business decisions depends on choosing the right KPIs in your dashboard to help you track your business performance, and choosing a KPI depends on a good understanding of your business goals and what is important to the organization. Some examples of KPIs to track are the number of new users over a period of time, how your product performs on social media, and your production and sales over time.

You can refer to our blog post Build Your Own KPI Examples with Sample Data Sources for more examples.

Digital dashboards can play an important role in helping define a strategy for business success. Dashboards differ greatly from one business to another depending on what data needs to be visualized and tracked to make decisions in the future.

Types of business dashboards

There are three main types of business dashboards: operational dashboards that update in real time, strategic dashboards that track your KPIs, and analytical dashboards that help in making future decisions based on past data.

Operational dashboards

These dashboards are generally used to visualize data related to daily operations in real time. Operational dashboards provide comprehensive snapshots of the day’s performance. This means avoiding drill-down visualizations in the data displayed in the initial view.

For example, consider the following retail business dashboard. The daily sales are listed and the performance is tracked on a daily basis without using drill-down charts or pivot grids.

Analytical dashboards

Analytics dashboards help you make decisions about the future based on your past data. They allow you to interact with the data on the dashboard with pivot tables and drill-down charts.

For example, the following dashboard shows production analysis with various factors quantity, manufacturing cost, labor cost, and others compared between the previous and current months to help make decisions for the next month.

Strategic dashboards

Strategic dashboards are most commonly used to share information throughout your organization to let everyone know what’s going on with the business and how it is performing over time. This can be used to motivate and propel the business toward success.

For example, in the following IT business dashboard, the KPIs are defined to track the number of issues and the average time required to resolve an issue. These statistics can motivate developers to improve their performance and resolve issues more quickly. They can also see the ratios between the numbers of tickets opened, resolved, and unresolved.

Before creating a dashboard, refer to our blog 5 Questions to Ask Yourself before Creating a Dashboard to determine an objective for your dashboard and how to achieve it.

Benefits of using digital dashboards

Using digital dashboards, business people attain many benefits that improve their overall business performance. Here I have listed the four most important benefits of using digital dashboards:

Decision-making

The most important factor to success in your business is decision-making. Dashboards complement this well by tracking important metrics and insights, providing evidence to guide you to better decisions.

Interaction

Visualizing data on dashboards varies from business to business. Some dashboards may show only static information whereas others require visualizing dynamic data as well. Digital dashboards allow you to interact with data through filtering and visualizing data over different time periods.

Collaboration

In an organization, everyone needs a way to collaborate to make better decisions. Digital dashboards allow you to collaborate with various departments in your organization over data by mentioning specific user names.

Mobility

It’s always useful to access data from one centralized location. With digital dashboards, you can access your data and analyze your business performance metrics through mobile devices and apps no matter where you are in the world. Sometimes it is helpful to access your business data anonymously, such as when you want to make it visible outside of your organization to showcase how your business is performing to clients or shareholders. Making a digital dashboard visible publicly allows anonymous access.

To learn more about the significance of dashboards, please refer to our blog Data Visualization: Importance and Benefits.

Visualize your data

We previously discussed the importance of KPIs in this white paper. However, it is also important to choose the right widgets to visualize data.

You can learn more about widgets in the Bold BI documentation Configuring Data Visualizations. To choose the best widgets, refer to our blog 5 Best Widget Types for Data Visualization.

Sample Dashboards

The following are some sample industry dashboard solutions:

• Insurance
• Pharmaceuticals
• Human Resources

You can also explore more sample dashboards categorized by industry and department under the Solutions menu on the Bold BI site home page.

Conclusion

Once you use them, digital dashboards become an essential part of making the right decisions for your business. Accessing dashboards through mobile devices and tablets means you can keep track of metrics anywhere in the world. It is easy to choose a KPI and the necessary widgets to visualize the data in a dashboard and share it within your organization or publicly.

If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

CData Connect Cloud provides data connectivity for more than 120 different cloud data sources with virtual database connections using the wire protocol database of MySQL instances. It enables integration with other cloud applications to connect their data sources using MySQL instances in an easy and secure manner. If you are new to the CData Connect Cloud, request a trial. Now that Syncfusion has partnered with CData Software, you can connect Syncfusion’s business intelligence dashboard platform, Bold BI^®, to any CData-supported data connector, including Shopify, Snowflake, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot. The virtual MySQL endpoint is provided by CData Connect Cloud for both cloud and enterprises versions.

In this blog, let’s see how to connect Northwind Traders Sales data in Google Sheets through creating a virtual database in the CData Connect Cloud and then create a live, interactive dashboard visualizing that data. CData Connect Cloud allows you to create a virtual database for any supported connector and make it available as a standard SQL interface.

If you are new to Bold BI dashboards, sign up for a free trial on our website. At the end of the registration process, you will reach the following page view.

Creating a virtual database in CData Connect Cloud

In your CData Connect Cloud, click the Google Sheets data source and create a virtual database by logging into your Google account.

Once you’ve authenticated and saved the Google Sheets virtual database, you are ready to connect to Bold BI with the MySQL endpoint.

Creating a sales dashboard

If you are new to data source creation, refer to Introduction to Bold BI Data Sources.

To create your dashboard, first connect to the Bold BI MySQL data source with the CData Connect Cloud MySQL instance in live mode. Live mode fetches the data from the database server by executing the query every time. Hence the dashboard shows the latest metrics in real time for live connections.

Once connected to the MySQL data source, the Google Sheets associated with your Google account will be shown as a table. Drag the required table to the canvas and save the data source.

Now you are all set to create a dashboard. Check out the How to Create a Dashboard video tutorial to get started with dashboard creation.

In the above sample dashboard, you can see the metrics of orders and total sales by country and product. You can also filter the data by selecting a specific country on the map widget. Now you can share your dashboard with your team and start to collaborate on the Bold BI^® dashboard online.

If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Business dashboards provide visualizations of business data to communicate metrics and other key points to users at a glance. Such a dashboard should respond quickly to any dynamic user interaction. The loading performance of a dashboard not only affects the dashboard objects’ rendering but also the connected database’s querying performance. In this article, let’s explore how SQL Server database columnar storage and indexing help to load dashboards much faster.

Setting up SQL Server database with sample data set and recordings

Take a sample data set of over 25 million records. For this example, we downloaded the UK HM Land Registry Price paid data set from this government site. Then move the data from the CSV file to a SQL Server database running in a local machine with 16 GB RAM.

Executing a simple count statement, it takes one minute and seven seconds for the first run to complete query execution. The second run takes only two seconds since it utilizes the SQL Server default caching operations of previous query results.

Note: I have used SQL Server Management Studio to run these queries and get these metrics.

Here are two more sample queries with recordings for testing purposes during both runs.

Actions for improved performance

As a business user, we expect our business dashboards to load in seconds. So, to speed up data access and aggregation, perform the following two actions:

1. Convert the row store to columnar store. This will give high performance gains for analytic queries that require scanning large amounts of data. Execute the following command to created clustered columnar store.

To learn more about column store in SQL Server, refer to this Microsoft documentation.

2.  Starting with SQL Server 2016, you can combine row store index and column store index on the same table. Create a nonclustered row index on the same table using the following command. This row index will improve table seek performance, so queries that look for matching values or return a range of values will perform better in row index than columnar index.

To verify whether the index has been created, try running the following command. This will describe the table details fully. At the bottom of the results, you can see that two indexes are present

Now let us rerun the sample queries to test the indexing performance.

You can see that there is monumental improvement in SQL Query performance once columnar indexing and row indexing is done. To learn more about combining column and row indexing for data warehousing needs, refer to this documentation.

Creating a dashboard

Now let’s build a dashboard connecting to this SQL Server database using Bold BI^®. To learn about how to connect with SQL Server from Bold BI, read this blog post. Consider the following widgets and data configuration to prepare a dashboard on the HM Land Registry Price paid data set.

Now the dashboard is ready.

Performance metrics

The average performance of this dashboard is given in the following.

To capture the query generated by Bold BI, use the SQL profiler trace option by connecting with the database server. Using the traced SQL queries for the previous dashboard, we have listed out the performance metrics for each of the queries before and after indexing separately for understanding.

Conclusion

With this blog, we can conclude that for data warehousing, data analytics, and dashboarding use cases, we should leverage the indexing support provided by SQL Server in order to gain high performance on analytics queries running on large data. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. Get started with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.