External Data sources

[Peter An]

Is it possible to add an external data source such as MongoDB to Chorus?

[Logan Lee]

MongoDB not a currently supported data source.  Its possible to develop additional data sources.  Data sources so far have either been read only sources to extract and move data out of (Oracle, Hadoop HDFS) or as both a source to extract and to use for sandboxing and data model development (GPDB, HAWQ).

[Ishwardeep Singh]

On Tuesday, 22 October 2013 01:53:16 UTC+5:30, Peter An wrote:
> Is it possible to add an external data source such as MongoDB to Chorus?

I also need to explore adding our an external data source to Chorus. Do we have any documentation that allows us to implement external data source in Chorus?

Your help in the same will be appreciated.

[Robbie GIll]

Hi Ishwardeep - 

The current development branch (master on https://github.com/Chorus/chorus) includes support for generic JDBC data sources (in addition to GPDB, Oracle, Hawq, and a slew of HDFS flavors). The development team is currently testing against Teradata 14, but we expect this work with other data sources providing access via a JDBC driver. It may take minor patches to support loading less common jdbc drivers into the Sequel interface. 

Support for generic JDBC data sources currently includes browsing data source, previewing tables/views, associating with workspaces, search, and creating visual workflows (with the alpine workflow module). 

What data sources are you interested in accessing via Chorus? Feel free to describe your plans/goals for Chorus and I can respond in more detail.

- Robbie

[Ishwardeep Singh]

Hi Robbie,

Thanks for a prompt response. 

Just wanted to share some background.

We have our own standalone application which is similar to chorus (but not as rich). It has 3 tiers UI, Server and backend database. UI and Server communicate using restful api that return json response. The backend database can be SQLLite or Postgres. The user can create workspaces, worksets and workviews. The user can import dataset in a workspace and visually analyze the data in workset via standard graphs like boxplot, trendchart and some custom domain specific UI representations. The UI invokes restful api exposed by the server to fetch data for any visual representation to be displayed to the server. Some of these restful api's run complex domain specific algorithm on the data in the workset to return data to be displayed by the UI. 

But our application does not support collaboration that allows users to share datasets or their analysis of the data. We are exploring the possibility of using chorus as a base platform for our application so that we can re-use these very useful features provided out of the box by chorus.

We are exploring the following:

1. How we can extend chorus to add our own domain specific UI implementation?

2. How we can integrate our server as external data source via restful api's? We want to reuse our server side implementation because re-writing the algorithms is a significant effort. 

I found very little documentation on how we can extend chorus. As we explore i would be more than willing to document how we can extend chorus and contribute the development effort if the same can be reused.

I know this is a very custom development effort that we want to do and may be their is a better way to integrate or build on top of chorus.Your suggestions / input on the same will be very much appreciated.

Regards,

Ishwardeep

[Shell (Aridhia Informatics)]

With regards to the UI, just to throw this into the mix; on our project we wanted a distinctive 'look' as well as quiet significant workflow changes. We were able to achieve this by extending the Backbone views, integrating Twitter Bootstrap, modification/addition of our own templates & replacement of all the stylesheets with our own. Importantly, it was all very light-touch on the Ruby side of things. There are a lot of bits, but it's not too hard.

At one point we did look at completely replacing the UI with our own. The REST API is solid & we were able to get prototype UI up and running pretty quickly.

[Ishwardeep Singh]

Hi Shell,

Thanks for sharing how you have customized the UI. I need some help on the backend side as well. If possible can you please share information related to that?

Regards,

Ishwardeep