In-Memory Analysis
Fast analysis, better insight and rapid deployment with minimal IT involvement! These are the leading benefits of in-memory analytics. With Yellowfin 5.0, In-memory analytics delivers decision insight with the agility that businesses demand. It’s a win for business users, who gain self-service analysis capabilities, and for IT departments, which can spend far less time on query analysis, cube building, aggregate table design, and other time- consuming performance-tuning tasks.

The implementation of the Yellowfin in-memory database is very easy indeed. All a user needs to do is create a Yellowfin view and on activation of that view they can load the data into an in-memory database. Yellowfin will automatically manage the connection to the new in-memory data store and populate the data from the original source system.

To find out more about our in-memory feature please see http://bit.ly/bS12tj

Spreadsheets as a Data Source
With over 250 million users’ worldwide, Microsoft Excel dominates the data collection and dissemination space. Unfortunately, they are prone to error and manipulation, making them a high-risk tool for reporting use. The reality though, is that excel will continue to be used as a data collection method, however, Yellowfin 5.0 introduces the ability to load and mange spreadsheet data as a reporting source.

With 5.0 users can load and share reports from excel spreadsheets through a central repository, putting process into an otherwise flawed one, which reduces organizational risk and improves information sharing. Any authorized user can load a spreadsheet and define it as a data source and then use that to write one or more reports from it. In addition users can update the data in the spreadsheet, either by replacing the whole sheet or appending new data to an existing.

Filter Enhancements
One of the core components of any BI solution is the ability to filter queries. In this release significant enhancements have not only occurred to the functionality of filters but also to the user interface that enables and controls the filtering process.

Functionally filters have been upgraded to allow users to select text based date ranges. What this means is that instead of having to select start and end dates using a date picker users can now select common date ranges such as last month, this quarter from a drop down list.

From the user interface perspective filter formatting and options have moved to the main report menu. Making it easier to format filters and see the results without having to re-run the report.

New Charts
Data visualization is a massive focus for us at Yellowfin. In this release there have been multiple small formatting enhancements to charts as well as the introduction of two new chart types. The Financial charts – that let you track high, low prices as well as volume and event charts – which are unique to Yellowfin. The event chart lets you track a time series metric – such as web site traffic against categorical events – such as marketing activities. This type of chart allows you to view a correlation between events and metric data.

View Builder – Meta Data Management
There have been substantial improvements to the view builder in this release. The main area of focus has been the ability to rollback changes made to a view after production reports have been written off it. What this means is that you can now edit a view, make changes, test the view and then if required roll back the changes to re-instate the view as it was prior to those edits taking place. It is a great feature – but we would prefer you use a development environment for this anyway.

Apart from this there have been a host of smaller usability changes, such as widening the view list, adding a search for views (we know some of you have many views across your data sources) and the ability to se which reports are using a particular field from within a view.