Creating Data on Demand Endpoints

With the Anzo Data on Demand service you can generate Open Data Protocol (OData)-based feeds that can be used to access Graphmarts programmatically via a RESTful API or from third-party business intelligence applications such as TIBCO Spotfire, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI. The OData protocol enables web clients to use simple HTTP messages to access resources that are identified using URLs. OData shares some similarities with JDBC and ODBC. Like ODBC, OData is not limited to relational databases. The Anzo Data on Demand service follows the OData Version 4.0 specification, which defines the standard URL conventions, query options, and metadata schema.

Anzo supports two types of Data on Demand endpoints. The first type is called an Auto-Generated endpoint. Auto-Generated endpoints are the quickest type to create. They simply make available as-is all of the data in the selected Data Layers. Any joins, filters, and other operations must be performed by the consumer of the data outside of Anzo and AnzoGraph.

The second type of endpoint is called a Custom endpoint (sometimes called a Table endpoint). Since queries that join data often perform very poorly when run in BI applications with a JDBC driver, Custom endpoints let you assemble custom queries that join classes and apply filters and formulas. The endpoint becomes a view in AnzoGraph and AnzoGraph executes the custom queries in memory. Results can then be viewed from the endpoint without having to run the complex analytic queries over JDBC.

The topics in this section provide instructions for creating both types of endpoints.