SiSense Prism

A few months ago I announced I was going to do a major series of reviews of client tools here… well, that fell flat (probably because it takes a bit too much effort to install and test one), but at least here’s one more review: Prism, from SiSense. Here’s their website:
http://www.sisense.com/

Strictly speaking it’s not just an Analysis Services client tool because it can work with data from a number of different sources such as relational tables, Excel and even Google spreadsheets and Amazon S3. I don’t know too much about their internal architecture but it seems to be based on storing the data retrieved from all these different sources in some kind of in-memory store, so I suppose in that way it’s similar to what will be coming in Excel with Gemini. They do treat Analysis Services as a data source seriously, though, and in fact one of the guys behind the company is Elad Israeli, who was behind a tool called MDXBuilder that those of you with very long memories might recall; so for the rest of this review I’ll concentrate on the AS client tool side of things.

First impressions are very good: the UI is very modern, uncluttered and easy to use. There are a few wrinkles in that there is no explicit support for AS2008 yet, and I had to go through a few hoops to get it to connect on my laptop which only had AS2008 installed; also they don’t show hierarchies grouped into dimensions, just a flat list of hierarchies from all dimensions, which is a pain when you have a lot of dimensions and hierarchies – they really should support folders etc. Since I’ve already mentioned this to SiSense hopefully this will be changed soon.

The tool itself is focused on creating dashboards and the starting point is a blank sheet on which you can drag ‘widgets’, which in turn can be hooked up to various data sources to display data. Examples of widgets are pivot controls, various different types of charts, images and textboxes, gauges, calendar controls, dropdown boxes and so on; it’s reminiscent of Reporting Services (but concentrates more on application building rather than pixel-perfect formatting) and PerformancePoint in this respect. I have to say that I found that I found the process of building a dashboard to be exceptionally easy and intuitive, and I was very impressed – I was able to put together something that worked very quickly, and it handled layout and formatting in such a way that even someone who is generally rubbish at report design like me could create a dashboard that looked professional. Here’s a screenshot of one I put together quite quickly:

One other very cool feature is the way that complex selections can be generated using a visual workflow, called ‘Questions’ in the product. You can read more about it on their blog here:
http://community.sisense.com/blogs/siblog/archive/2008/11/19/250.aspx
…but the easiest way of thinking about it is as something like the SSIS dataflow for MDX sets (similar to something I blogged about a while ago). Here’s an example of that returns the top 10 Dates by Internet Sales Amount unioned with the bottom 10 Dates by Internet Sales Amount where Internet Sales Amount is greater than $500:

I think this is the best way I’ve seen of letting users set up complex filters, although it probably is still only something a power user could understand.

At the moment Prism is just a fat client, so with no web-based version (yet) sharing dashboards is a matter of emailing .psm files or putting them on a network share; this will be a deal-breaker for some people. SiSense have, though, in my opinion made the right decision in implementing the functionality they have got very well before rushing off to tick all the boxes on potential buyers’ checklists and doing so badly. Overall, if you’re in the market for a desktop BI tool that supports Analysis Services as well as other data sources I can recommend taking a look at Prism.