Real-Time Access to SaaS Data

Grazed from Smart Data Collective. Author: Gadi Yedwab.

Data stored in SaaS applications is often inaccessible to BI tools. This is a major headache to early adopters of SaaS applications. With on-premise applications, IT departments can bypass the application and access data directly from the underlying database. With multi-tenant SaaS applications, such direct database access is not available because the database is shared with other customers.

Understanding the Problem
Ideally, all data access should go through the application. There are some very compelling reasons to go through the application:…

• The application manages data-level access rights. For example, allowing a user to only see data for their region.
• The application manages data at a business-object level. Such data objects are often assembled via object-relational mapping of application objects to relational database tables.
• Multitenant SaaS applications restrict users from seeing data that belongs to other tenants.
• For these reasons, bypassing the application to access data directly from the underlying database is not a good idea in general, and is not possible with SaaS applications…

Read more from the source @ http://smartdatacollective.com/exploreanalytics/122826/saas-data-real-time-access