CDF : Searchability of Data

CDF needs some serious help in searching and querying data.

I asked about some simple reporting, like a query telling me how many pumps are in Acid South.  To do this within CDF requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of our metadata fields and what they mean.  In this case, understanding that pumps would be found in the SAP data source, and that equipment class was held within the Catalog Profile metadata field, then having to know what numerical code from SAP for Cat Profile actually corresponded to pumps.  It’s easier to do in SAP.

Even once the list was created in CDF, there is no way to export it.  You can look at it within CDF, but that’s it.  For something like a bad actor report, Crystal indicated that our current options were to have a Celanese person proficient in python to write one or hire Cognite to write one.

All this is to say that from a usability perspective, CDF is, at the current point in time, probably only good for looking up individual pieces of information, one at a time.  The effective reporting capability is basically zero.  I can’t say I was expecting anything more than that, but I was a little surprised that their answer to everything was to go code whatever you wanted yourself in Python.

In my head, I was envisioning something like Pivot Table level usability with the CDF data.