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We picked out 5 random things that you should know about Bime to give you a little overview of its capabilities.

1. You don’t have to be an IT whizz to use Bime.

Yes, believe it or not, not everyone that uses Bime is an IT pro. In fact, it’s almost the opposite – Bime is designed to empower professionals outside of the IT department, with a view to freeing up IT demand so that IT departments can focus solely on their strategic IT role. There is no hardware, no software to install, no deployment and no manual update. And because Bime has been designed for normal people, only meaningful design features are available; not because we don’t care, but because less is more: beautiful visual design meets effortless functionality.

2. We give you Bime for free.

Well, for the first month anyway. Whether you later intend on opening a paid account or not, we’ll always start you off with 30 days at no cost to you. This is to give you a chance to explore the fully-functional Enterprise version of Bime and work out how it can benefit you and your business, with no obligation to upgrade. So what have you got to lose? Open a new account here.

3. There is a desktop version of Bime.

You never stop hearing about the benefits of the SaaS version of Bime, but we also offer Bime Desktop. Bime Desktop is the same application (same look and feel, same features as your online version of Bime) but it can connect on-premise data such as your personal Excel files or your organizational databases (such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostGre, Access…).

What’s so great about it? You can use the same account and login that you use for the online version of Bime. Every query, dashboard and new connection you created in the cloud is available in your desktop application. Both the desktop and SaaS version will give you exactly the same views and navigation options.

Bime Desktop allows you to gather on-premise data AND cloud data in the same dashboards. For example: On the one hand: you have budgeted your marketing campaign using Excel. On the other hand: you use Google Analytics to analyze it. Now, you can create a dashboard with both sets of information in one place!

You can load Bime desktop here.

4. Your data is secure and we don’t store it.

Your data is yours. We don’t store it. We only store the way you want to analyze it – in this way, Bime acts like a connection. This is called metadata. Your metadata and information related to your account is backed up each day.

All Bime accounts include 128-bit SSL security. What is SSL? SSL is an acronym for “Secure Socket Layer”, a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows Bime to securely communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or communications forgery. It is the same technology used by banks and e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com to keep your information safe and secure during transactions. In Bime’s case, SSL keeps your data connections absolutely secure (Bime’s normal password protection keeps your information private, but SSL keeps it private and secure). Even the free version has SSL on all Bime connections.

All of our servers are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale datacenters. This experience has been applied to the AWS platform and infrastructure. AWS datacenters are housed in nondescript facilities. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state of the art intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means.

5. You can analyze your Google Analytics data at a highly detailed level.

As you may or may not be aware, in Bime’s last couple of releases, the focus has been heavily on the Google Analytics Connector. Not only can you drill right down into your Google Analytics data, but you can now also analyze several profiles at the same time with profile aggregation – a feature which is super useful for comparing your different websites. Previously you had to analyze each separate website, then export your data, collate it.. let’s just say, Bime now does all the hard work for you, freeing you up to focus on other more important things – such as how you are going to use your newly-found insight to improve your website traffic.

What else? Dynamic Segmentation was one of the top new features deployed by Google in their API. With Bime 1.97 you’ll get full support when it comes to segmentation.

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Google Analytics: Profile aggregation

Our Google Analytics connector beta tests were clear about the number one feature people wanted to see: “give us the ability to analyse several profiles at the same time”. Well, 2 weeks later, you’ve now got it! In the connection builder just pick up the profile you want to aggregate and that’s it.

In your analysis session, all the results displayed are now the aggregation of all the profiles you selected. Be carefull however, it works really well with additive metrics (visits, pages view etc..) but can be misleading with non-additive ones (avg time on page). For these metrics, you can obviously disaggregate the data with the new “Profiles” dimension to get the details of each profile and compare them easily.

Google Analytics: Segmentation

Dynamic Segmentation was one of the top new features deployed by Google in their API. With Bime 1.97 you’ll get full support when it comes to segmentation.

From the Google Analytics blog:

A segment is a subset of your data. Usually, it refers to a subset of visitors whose behavior you would like to see and analyze. For instance, usually you are looking at all visits to your site. You may want to analyze only the “Paid Traffic” or “Visits with Conversions” or “Organic traffic” segments and even compare these segments side by side in reports. Advanced Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze these subsets of your traffic.

At the first level of support, we grab all the default segments available in Google Analytics. This one was easy, but you also get a special attribute called “All Segments” where we stack all the segments. With this one, you can select any number (limited to 3 in the Google Analytics Interface) of segments to compare them, aggregate them etc…

At the second level of support, we grab all the custom segments defined in your account. When we say “All”, it is really “All”: your custom segments are now cross-profile and can be applied on profiles where the custom segments were not originally defined.

Finally, at the third level of support: dynamic segments. You can define a new segment at any time that will be stored in your connection and apply it right away in the current state of your analysis. Here is what it looks like: you are deep in an analysis for one of your customers. You discover that a lot of people came through a special page which came from a paid referral souce. Decomposing it by country, you discover that they come from the US, which is the target market of your customer’s poduct. Before writing an email to your customer asking him to assign more of his budget to this source, you want to be sure it’s quality traffic. A quick and dirty way of doing that is the “time on site” metric. You decide to create a “dynamic segment” that is “ga:timeonsite&gt5″. Instantly, your figures drop dramatically by 80%. What does this mean? That most of the traffic coming from this source doesn’t give much value to your customer, as people leave the website less than 5 seconds after they arrived. In a nutshell, with dynamic segments you can filter your data at such a detailed level that it provides context required for your current Q/A session.

Visual SQL Builder

So, you don’t want / don’t know how to write SQL queries? The new visual SQL Builder is here to help you and save you time! You can now map an entire database easily in your connection.

In the RDBMS connection builder: click on the designer tab and click on the “launch” button.

Now, you just have to select a couple of tables and link them together. To create a link:

Click on one of the four circles around your table: a black arrow appears. Then click on one of the four arrows of the other table that you want to link:

A new window appears where you can edit how you want to link the 2 two tables

Also, please note that you can click on preview at any time to see what the result of your query will look like.

Calculations: Groups

Groups allow you to gather several attribute values into groups. Let say you have “Coca Cola”, “Mountain Dew”, “Orange Juice”, “Pineapple Juice” in your data. You want to create a “soft drink” category (“Coca Cola” + “Mountain Dew”) and Fruit Juice (“Orange Juice”, “Pineaple Juice”) to analyze them together.

Click on the black arrow next to your attribute, and choose “Group”:

Calculations: Sets

Sets allow you to select a subset of the data by selecting one or more dimension members that are of interest to you. Once you have created a set, it is stored in the connection. This saves you from having to recreate the set every time you want to use it.

Click on the black arrow next to your attribute, and choose “Set”:

Calculations: Fixed Measures

Let say you want to compare your performance against the sales of your best month: June. You can now create a fixed measure that will freeze June’s sales allowing you to benchmark and compare your figures against this reference line.

Fixed what? The technical rationale is that most calculations in Bime are “contextualized” by the elements in the query. A Fixed Measure allows you to “de-contextualize” the query and always display the same figure across query elements.

Click on the black arrow next to Measures:

…this will trigger the fixed measure window:

Date range selection

You can now easily filter a range of dates when using time elements in your query.

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The dashboard contains 3 visualizations which all show different relationships.

The first, the treemap, shows the number of users in July 2010 in relation to the percentage penetration (number of people on Facebook as a percentage of the country’s population). The size of each individual box within the treemap shows the total number of Facebook users in the country. The strength of the color shows the percentage penetration, with the darkest blue being attributed to a higher percentage of users, and the lightest blue being attributed to the lowest. As you can see from the visualization, the USA has more than 3 times the number of users as any other country in the data, but not the highest number of people on Facebook as a percentage of the country’s population. As it is difficult to distinguish different shades of blue when the data is so close, you can hover over the points to get more detailed information. By doing this we can quickly see that Hong Kong has the highest concentration of users with regards to its population. Another (perhaps easier) way of finding this out is by simply altering the filters for the data which can be found underneath the attributes box on the right hand side.

The second visualization is the geovisualization, or heat map. We have chosen graduated circles to display the information but you can change it back to the original heatmap format by clicking on “Rendering Mode” in the bottom left hand corner. Here we see the relationship between the population and the percentage penetration. The size of the graduated circles show proportionately the population size, and the number inside demonstrates the percentage penetration. A very simple but a highly visual representation, the heatmap is probably the best way to get an overall geographical idea of where Facebook’s users are around the world.

Lastly, our third chart is the classic pie chart. It is better to use this type of chart when there is not too much data (pie charts work best with smaller data sets because after a certain point the data becomes impossible to read) so we have used the filters to filter out any country with a population of less than 10 million. This gives us a nice overview of the relationship between the percentage penetration and the number of users. We have also chosen to display the percentage penetration measure by size, to make it really clear which countries have a high percentage (USA, UK) and which have a low percentage (India, Mexico). Bime automatically chooses different colors for each segment which make the chart aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.

Don’t forget to make each visualization fullscreen when you look at it, by clicking the little box in the top right hand corner of each chart, so you can really see the details of your data set. Alternatively you can view all three together fullscreen by clicking “Fullscreen” in the bottom left hand corner of the dashboard. If you want to export a PDF or an image of your visualization, Bime makes it super easy to do this – no more messing around with printscreen – simply click the “Export PDF” or “Export Image” buttons at the bottom of the dashboard (N.B. heatmaps cannot be exported). Equally you might choose to export your data to an Excel spreadsheet.

Datasource: The Guardian.

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We’ve made a video to go along with the release of the Google Analytics Connector in Bime. In under 4 minutes we take you through a few of the basic operations you can now do using your Google Analytics data. We explain how to create a connection, how to deploy queries and how to ask different questions of your data. It then delves even deeper by demonstrating filters and calculated attributes. So by now you must be curious about how it all works…. see for yourself, here:

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Bime V1.95 is out with 2 new killer features: a Google Analytics Connector and Undo / Redo capabilities in the pivot table.

Google Analytics Connector

Warning: this is a huge deal! We have never been so exited about a new feature. Imagine that you could unleash the power of all your data stored in Google Analytics in a best of breed Business Intelligence User Interface… Well from today, you can ask dynamic questions, drill up, drill down into your clickstream data, and understand trends, patterns and relationships like never before, through cutting edge visualizations. Understand your website visitors’ behavior, improve your conversion rate, and in the long run, your income. Two words: “TRY IT”, this is seriously useful!

We are so exited about this connector that we created a whole new blog for it: analytics.bimehq.com. It is all about web analytics through Google Analytics Tips And Tricks and the Bime connector. Please bookmark it and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Undo / Redo

A simple feature with a huge impact on the data analysis experience. You can now go back and forth in the pivot table at each step of your question and answer session.

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The answer so far was either a major Excel hand-made data crunching or using a kind of ETL tool. Today, we offer you a new way of doing this kind of merge, much more quickly and simply: the composite connections of Bime.

A composite model is basically an in-memory merge of two base connections. The type of connection doesn’t matter so you can bring and mix data from Excel, any major RDBMS, simpleDB, Google Spreadsheets etc… Once Bime has the data, a fusion will occure in memory and “boom”: you have a cube in memory ready to be queried.

Our main focus was to make the configuration as easy as possible. In the following video, I merge a spreadsheet with some salesforce data in 2 minutes. Hope you’ll like this feature as much as we do.

Happy data analysis.

Ready to try Bime? Take the free trial

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• standard mac book pro 2Gb of Rams.
• Database is Sql Server 2005 that runs in a virtual machine on the same machine.
• 3,5 millions of rows. The dataset has dimensions with a pretty low cardinality.
• We skipped data retrieve time. We use standard JDBC here. However, we have a small performance impact above JDBC as we need to marshal data between Flex and Java.

For Flex developers interested in what’s happening under the wood, we used heavily vectors to build the OLAP engine. It would be impossible to achieve this level of performance with standard Array. We used green thread to optimize the rendering. Merapi is used for the bridge between Java and Air…

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