Best Practices: Working with Multiple Environments

What exactly are "multiple environments?" It's an infrastructure that allows your business to separate BI development endeavors from the live environment the organization uses for reporting and analytics.

"Why would I need it?" Development is not always a quick 5 or even 15-minute fix. Larger projects can take days, weeks, even months to complete, so you need a sandbox for the developers to 'play' in while the rest of the organization continues forward with 100% uptime on their live reporting environment. Some organizations may even choose to separate the Dev sandbox from QA (Quality Assurance) efforts, so a third Test environment may be needed!

But "do I need multiple environments?" As with any business question, 'it depends'. If your development is limited to just adding a field here or a new measure there during the initial implementation of your business intelligence project, you may be able to wiggle by without separated environments.

It may make sense to separate development from the live environment if:

• your organization has many customizations in the ERP (which won't be reflected in an off-the-shelf implementation)
• you're tackling questions unanswerable in the off-the-shelf BI environment you purchased
• your organization is actively using and reliant on the reporting environment

​​

It may make sense to implement a QA environment if your organization has

• formal processes for auditing data quality
• legal obligations to report 100% accurate data to external bodies (ex. financial auditors, government bodies)
• low tolerance for seeing 'weird data' in their live environment

Ready to get started today?

• Review your current implementation with our  4hr - Scoping & Assessment Workshop
• Put your BI development team through our DWA Master's Course

This presentation is preparation for a training series Onyx Reporting will be conducting in 2017! Join our mailing list to keep up with special offers, training opportunities and our blog series.