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While on a recent trip to Egypt, I noticed some wall paintings in several of the tombs I visited showing a person sitting in front of an offering table with what looked like a bunch of thin, vertical oblong objects, tapered at the top, and tightly packed together. I took a photo and showed it to my Archeologist friend who immediately told me it was sliced bread!
Now, there is no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians invented sliced bread (that accolade was given to Otto Frederick Rohwedder in 1928) but they did make, eat, and give offerings of a lot of bread, and Egyptologists have called this particular type, sliced bread.
Whoever created the phrase, “best thing since sliced bread”, it has prevailed in our English vocabulary since the 1930’s as an expression that refers to something that someone thinks is very good, original, and exciting, which is exactly why I want to blog about InfoBurst Squirrel.
The bread is Squirrel365 which is a low code/no code rapid application development tool that allows you to build visual web-based applications simply and quickly by dragging components on to a canvas, defining their properties and using a built-in spreadsheet to perform all the functions. You can build dashboards, value calculators and full-blown applications rapidly in just a few hours.
The bread slicer is InfoBurst Dash, which is a platform for providing connection options to data sources and scheduling, bursting and delivering that data to an application or its own in-memory data cache.
Combining Squirrel365 and InfoBurst Dash gives you a solution for integrating and improving performance/scalability of rapidly developed BI or operational applications with back-end data sources and deploying them in the cloud, on-premise, or even offline.
InfoBurst Squirrel has built in connectors to any ODBC data source, both read and write, so you can write back to databases. It also has an in-memory cache connector and a query cache connector so that you could use SQL from Squirrel to only pull back specific data sets from the in-memory cache. This provides super-fast access to your data from Squirrel and tremendous scalability for supporting many users.
You can schedule queries, Excel or BusinessObjects to populate the in-memory cache based on time, event, or both, and set your own refresh frequency. The cache can contain millions of rows of data.
You can also just directly access the data from a database if you do not want to use the cache!
InfoBurst Squirrel also allows you to deliver offline Squirrel applications along with an offline data cache so that you could schedule external distributions and updates of your application without users needing to access your system. This requires a free downloadable data viewer that you will allow you to interact with the application on any Windows device.
InfoBurst Squirrel can complement any existing BI tool by providing a means to build a BI application with great performance, scalability, write back capability very fast and very inexpensively. Organizations like Salesforce, Honda, Bosch, Tenet Health, and the US Navy, to name a few, are reaping the benefits of it today. In fact, Salesforce expects to add over $1 billion to its ARR this year as a result of the InfoBurst Squirrel ROI Value Calculators they built and use.
So, obviously I think InfoBurst Squirrel is the best thing since sliced bread. I would love to know if you agree so I encourage you to check it out.
