Technical Information

Yellowfin is a robust enterprise solution for all your reporting needs. Its key strength; ease of use, enables rapid deployment to your business users ensuring that you maximize the return on your Business Intelligence investment.

The road to Business Performance Management product selection and standardization is a treacherous one, with few people understanding what features are different among the products and how those differences affect usability, manageability, cost and ultimately success.

The key features of Yellowfin that reduce the total cost of ownership for your enterprise include:

Web Based Java Architecture
Enterprise ScalaBusiness Performance Management
Simplified Semantic Layer Management
Security
Rapid Deployment Methodology

Web Based / Java

Yellowfin has been developed for flexibility and performance from the ground up. The Yellowfin server is an Enterprise Java application that leverages several open standards to ensure the best possible integration with windows, linux & unix databases and security systems.

The Yellowfin user interface is entirely web-based for administrators, report writers and end users. A significant amount of usability testing has been done to ensure all tasks are clear and user-friendly.
Report and Dashboard creation is all point and click with wizards to guide you through the simple process. Business users can see all available data in business terms and can 'drag and drop' this information into their report. Reports can be previewed and formatted in real time.
Advanced functionality such as complex formatting, multiple reports & graphs on the same page, drill down and through etc are all achieved through the preview screen with no coding required.

Enterprise Scalability

The Yellowfin server is based on the enterprise java industry-standard tomcat application server. Tests show that tomcat is either equal to or significantly outperforms the commercial application servers. Find Out More >

Out of the box the Yellowfin application server will support between 100 and 200 concurrent users on a single-processor server (eg. 2GHz Pentium 4 with 512Mb RAM)**. For a typical installation this would conservatively equate to an end-user community of between 1,000 and 2,000 users.

Architecture

Fig 1. Yellowfin Architecture

For larger installations, Yellowfin can be scaled either vertically (using larger servers) or horizontally (using load balancers and clustering). Yellowfin can be easily configured to run in a fault-tolerant cluster over several machines and behind dedicated web servers such as apache or IIS.

** Assumes the database is on a separate server. Note that our tests were performed on a medium sized database and that performance can vary greatly depending upon the complexity of reports, volume of data being processed and standard user's activity. It is recommended that these figures are used as indicative guidelines only.

Metadata Layer

Meta Data Layer

To enable report writers to see information in business terms, Yellowfin provides a metadata layer.

This tool allows an administrator to map physical data into a simplified business view. The administrator or analyst can define key properties about the data, such as field definitions, reference code lookups and properties (eg. dimension, measure, non-additive measure etc).

The analyst can also create custom calculations such as ratios, averages, etc.

Users interact with the meta data layer and as such do not have to understand the complexity of the underlying data or database. They view data in simple business terms.

Security

Yellowfin has a robust security model that ensures the security of your Business Performance Management implementation. The areas on which Yellowfin is focused are:

User Authentication - Confirming that the person accessing Yellowfin is a known user, and that their identity can be verified.
User Authorization - Determining the Yellowfin functionality, reports, and data that the user is authorized for. This includes:
1. Role and functional security
2. Report entity access
3. Data security
Internet architecture and transmission security - Ensuring that information delivery is secure and prevents unauthorized access.

Security model

Fig 3. Yellowfin Security Model

Rapid Deployment

An out-of-the box installation of the Yellowfin server can be performed in less than an hour and will support a typical end user community of around 1,000 users.

Our experience has been that the identification and collation of the data to be reported on has been the critical/limiting factor in Business Performance Management deployment time. Once this has been achieved, the Yellowfin platform can deliver results that re-define the Business Performance Management benchmark for rapid delivery.

The reporting and dashboard development process is extremely quick and is generally measured in hours rather than days or weeks. Yellowfin has delivered a number of small to medium installations from planning through delivery & training in less than two weeks.