CoffingDW makes the impossible possible with Progress DataDirect

CoffingDW is a company built on the motto, “Don’t wait for the future to happen. Create it!” So when CoffingDW founder and CEO, Tom Coffing saw the need to defragment data management, he and his team didn’t wait for someone else to create a solution. They got to work. 

Over 15 years ago, Coffing and the CoffingDW team started developing a revolutionary product called the Nexus Query Chameleon. The dream was to give businesses the power to model, join, query, convert and move data between systems. 

“Getting these machines talking to each other, that’s the blood flow of your entire operation,” explains Coffing. CoffingDW data warehousing solutions all stem from a vendor- and hardware-neutral approach. It’s an approach they believe is the future of computing.

Prior to the completion of the Nexus Query Chameleon, connecting data sources like Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, MongoDB and Hadoop was considered impossible.

Even after years of research and development, CoffingDW had system-neutral software and a client list that included some of the biggest companies in the world but they were still searching for a way to query multiple systems from a single source. 

The Progress® DataDirect® solution gave the CoffingDW team the functionality they’d been looking for.

Tom Coffing says it was either the DataDirect platform or nothing. “We talked to some of our Teradata counterparts and they said listen, you want to move data between Oracle, SQL Server and Teradata with the press of a button, DataDirect is the only way to do that.” 

“Performance was huge for us,” says Coffing. To realize the dream of Nexus Query Chameleon, the CoffingDW team needed a solution for connection, security and rapid data movement. “To make all systems look like one, those DataDirect drivers make that possible.”

Not only was the DataDirect solution the only one of its kind, it enabled the Nexus Query Chameleon to function like nothing in history. When the CoffingDW team showed their solution to top cloud providers, the audience was in disbelief. “They said, that’s not possible,” recalls Coffing. “We said, well you’re seeing it,”

With DataDirect integration, Nexus Query Chameleon was able to do joins between Teradata, Oracle and 
SQL Server. 

The solution was 15 years in the making, but it only took two weeks to deploy the final piece of the puzzle, the DataDirect solution. “It just happened like magic,” explains Coffing. “And we were able to move data so unbelievably fast.”

With the DataDirect solution, the CoffingDW team saw productivity skyrocket.

“We literally took projects that could be six weeks long and did them in a day,” says Coffing. After the DataDirect platform integration, Nexus Query Chameleon functionality was unparalleled. “We could provide things to the largest financial institution in the world that they couldn’t find anywhere else.” 

DataDirect drivers have helped improve the CoffingDW offering on several fronts, including:

• Lowering costs and time to market
• Enabling the teams to focus on product development (instead of maintenance)
• Supporting unprecedented cross-system query functionality

But most importantly, the DataDirect drivers have given Coffing and his team the ability to create a product that simply couldn’t exist otherwise. “The DataDirect solution has given us that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have the right product at the right time, during the right exact paradigm shift, to put us in a great position. So we’re very excited about the future.”