BIEVERY

Inspiration

Working on the backend always thought about how can have a quick dashboard without much effort. An idea came into my mind that APIs are sources of data. If we can turn the data generated from API into relational data then we can use BI tools to connect to RDBMS.

What it does

BI tools act as a front end for data viewing. You can visualize data in beautiful charts and data grids. You can filter data using controls available in BI tools. You can interact with the BI tool just like a front end no need to trigger an application to dump data. You get updates sitting within the BI tool.

Everything you need in one dashboard. Like you can have data from multiple Jira, Teamwork, Pivotal Tracker instances in one place. If the analysis dataset is small but highly volatile and you need updates in real-time then BIEVERY is for you because you don't have to wait for the regular intervals to see the results.

BIEVERY can scale to support a big user base because we serve data in real-time and we are not piling up the data. Another dimension we can scale in is the API set we cover at little cost.

BIEVERY is a step towards a single source of truth because sometimes developers are logging the same information in multiple systems like Jira and Teamwork. With BIEVERY there is no need to do that.

How we built it

To be generic written a routine (prototype) to convert JSON to relational data. The front end is built in PHP using Codeigniter. Backend is MariaDB

Challenges we ran into

JSON to relational conversion is challenging however I managed to come up with an implementation that allows cherry-picking JSON nodes and the routine converts Json paths to relational data with some limitations