Vertica Integration with BIME: Connection Guide

Applies to Vertica 7.2.x and earlier 

About Vertica Connection Guides

Vertica connection guides provide basic information about setting up connections to Vertica from software that our technology partners create. These documents provide guidance using one specific version of Vertica and one specific version of the third party vendor’s software. Other versions of the third-party product may work with Vertica. However, other versions may not have been tested. This document provides guidance using the latest versions of Vertica and BIME as of January, 2016.

Document Overview

BIME is a Zendesk product and is a SaaS (software as a service), cloud-based data analytics platform. BIME uses a built-in connector to connect to the Vertica analytic database. This document describes how you can connect Vertica to BIME and build sample dashboards. This document assumes you are familiar with both BIME and Vertica.

This document is based on results from testing BIME Analytics 6 with Vertica 7.2.x.

Connect to Vertica from BIME

Before you can connect to Vertica from BIME, you must define the connection by following these steps:

  1. Log in to your BIME analytics account.
  2. From the Type page, select the Vertica connector as your Data source builder.

bime1.png

  1. Click Next. On the Info page, enter the following required information:
  • Vertica user
  • Vertica password
  • Host
  • Port

 bime2.png

  1. If you want to specify any connection attributes, use the JDBC Connection Properties box. Click Select under Database name and choose your Vertica database.
  2. Click Next.

Design Dashboards

To design dashboards, you must import schemas and underlying tables.

  1. BIME provides 3 options for importing you database tables. Select the Designer
  2. The Launch Designer wizard opens. Select the tables you want to import.
  3. Click the eye icon in the bottom-right corner of a table to view the data in the table.
  4. Create a link between two tables to create joins.
  5. Select the join type as shown in the following graphic.

    6. bime3.png

  6. Click Ok. Now, you have defined relationships between tables.
  7. Click Ok. The final SQL generates.

    8. bime4.png

  8. Click Ok. The Schema page appears.
  9. Select the appropriate attributes and measures for your data.
  10. Click Next. The Storage page appears.
  11. Select None.
  12. Click Save. The Query Builder page opens.

You can now begin designing your dashboards.

Sample Dashboard

The following graphic shows an example dashboard in BIME. This dashboard shows three panels, each displaying a separate piece of data. The panel on the upper left shows sales per year from 2003 to 2007. The panel on the upper right shows sales per state, with larger circles representing greater sales. The panel on the bottom of the dashboard shows sales by category, with food having the greatest number of sales.

bime5.png


Known Limitations

BIME does not support LONGVARCHAR and LONGVARBINARY data types.

For More Information

For More Information About… See…

BIME

http://www.bimeanalytics.com/ 

Vertica Community Edition

https://vertica.com/community/

Vertica Documentation

http://vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/index.htm

Big Data and Analytics Community

https://vertica.com/big-data-analytics-community-content/