Gigasheet Enterprise: Live Query Mode

Gigasheet Enterprise provides two operational modes to access and analyze data from your data sources: Managed Mode and Live Query Mode. This guide will cover Live Query Mode, detailing how to configure it, its benefits and trade-offs, and best practices for maximizing its use within your enterprise data environment.

What is Live Query Mode?

In Live Query Mode, Gigasheet connects directly to your database or data warehouse to query data in real-time without storing source data within Gigasheet’s infrastructure. As users interact with Gigasheet's spreadsheet-like UI, dynamically generates SQL and issues queries to the underlying data source. This setup enables users to work with live data on demand, with every query fetching the most up-to-date information from your source systems.

Advantages of Using Live Query Mode

1. Real-Time Data Access: Live Query Mode provides direct access to data from your warehouse or database in real-time. This allows users to analyze the most current information without waiting for batch refreshes, making it ideal for time-sensitive analytics.

2. Single Source of Truth: Since data isn't stored within Gigasheet, Live Query Mode eliminates concerns around data duplication, secondary storage costs, or the need to manage data replication. All your data remains in your source environment, minimizing security risks and simplifying data governance.

3. Reduced Data Latency: Users always interact with the live data source, ensuring that the information is as current as possible. This is particularly beneficial for dashboards, operational analytics, and any scenario where data changes frequently and insights need to be immediate.

4. Controlled Performance & Cost: The performance of queries in Live Query Mode is directly dependent on the underlying database or warehouse. This allows organizations to scale performance according to their needs and budgets by leveraging the existing performance tiers and scaling features of their data sources.

Potential Drawbacks of Live Query Mode

1. Dependent on Source Performance: The speed and responsiveness of Gigasheet’s Live Query Mode are determined by the performance of your data source. If your database or data warehouse has long-running queries or slow performance, it can impact the user experience in Gigasheet.

2. Limited Offline Access: Since data is not stored within Gigasheet, users require a live connection to the source system to perform analysis. If the connection to the data source is interrupted, access to the data is lost until the connection is restored.

Best Practices for Enterprise Data Management in Live Query Mode

1. Optimize Source System Performance: Since Live Query Mode depends on querying your source system in real-time, ensure that your databases or warehouses are optimized for analytics. This may include proper indexing, partitioning, and the use of materialized views or other optimizations to speed up queries.

2. Leverage Role-Based Access Controls and/or SSO Gigasheet: Use Gigasheet’s controls to restrict which users can execute queries against the live data source. This helps to manage access to sensitive data and prevents unintentional performance impacts on your source systems from inefficient queries.

3. Monitor Source Query Usage and Costs: Since all queries are executed in real-time against the source, monitor how often Gigasheet queries are run, and be aware of potential cost implications (especially for cloud data warehouses that charge based on query volume). Implement guidelines for query best practices to optimize performance and cost-efficiency.

4. Utilize Source-Side Query Caching: If supported by your data source, enable query caching to reduce the load on your database for frequently accessed data. Cached queries can significantly improve performance for repeated operations in Gigasheet without hitting the source system with fresh queries every time.

Use Cases for Live Query Mode

Live Query Mode is well-suited for scenarios where real-time data access is essential, such as:

• Operational Analytics: Real-time monitoring of business KPIs, supply chain updates, or financial metrics where insights must reflect the latest data.
• Time-Sensitive Analysis: Analyzing sales, inventory, or web traffic data on demand to inform immediate business decisions.
• Exploratory Analysis on Dynamic Datasets: Performing data exploration on datasets that change frequently, such as IoT data, event streams, or rapidly evolving customer data.

Conclusion

Live Query Mode in Gigasheet Enterprise enables real-time, dynamic access to data across various data sources without storing it within Gigasheet. It is particularly advantageous for scenarios requiring the most up-to-date insights, making it a powerful option for operational analytics and time-sensitive decision-making.

By following best practices around query optimization, performance management, and access controls, organizations can effectively leverage Live Query Mode to analyze their data directly from its source, achieving both flexibility and immediacy in their data workflows.