Why Strata?
The five official reasons to tell your boss
1. Your data has a story to tell
A sizable investment goes into building websites, web services, business intelligence platforms and other IT infrastructure. The data at the heart of all this machinery can be extremely beneficial, if you can gather useful information and insights from it.
Strata is the ideal tool to help you unlock this value. It's simple enough for just about anyone to use, and provides a flexible work environment to whip your data into shape. It can help you cut through the clutter of new, unfamiliar data sets and then quickly transform and assemble these raw materials into a relevant and useful resource.
2. Your time is valuable
Strata is all about getting things done quickly. For data analysis tasks, it removes many of the time-consuming parts, such as going through an import process to work with data, determining data structure and writing SQL statements. For developers, it provides a toolkit for creating quick, ad hoc applications for the web. And Strata is fast — it cuts through a data set like a hot knife through butter.
3. Use and share a growing set of data resources
With Strata, you can create and share specialized data utilities with others via the web. For instance, if you want to clean up a list of addresses in MySQL, first check to see if someone has already created a custom extension for this. If not, you can create one for yourself and then share it with the community.
4. Flex the wiring of your database infrastructure
Whether you need to migrate data to a new system or integrate a data feed from an unfamiliar API, Strata is a very handy tool for mixing and matching data from different sources. For instance, you can quickly relate two tables together and simply drag fields from one table to the other for quick integration.
5. The web is evolving
With a growing number of websites adding semantic tags and making their silos of data available via an API, the nature of the web is steadily shifting from documents to data. With the emergence of this “Data Web”, a new kind of user interface is needed to interact with data-oriented content in an ad hoc way.
Strata is built with this in mind. You can plug into any API on the web and then query and browse its contents. You can integrate data from across the web (whether from an API, an RSS feed, a CSV file, or a web page), store it locally, reformat it as a report, and/or use it in your own rich internet application.
