Software Requirements
- Prominence assumes the Customer BI Tool servers will have the following software installed at the time of project kickoff:
- Excel 2010 or later
- Proper server connection tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or Oracle SQL
- Prominence assumes Customer has a BI Tool version that is within three ‘dot’ releases of the current publicly available BI Tool release, and that Customer has sufficient licenses available for Prominence staff to use throughout the duration of the engagement to develop in BI Tool.
- Prominence assumes Customer has a version of BI Tool Server within the latest three dot releases installed, configured, and running on, at minimum, a test/dev environment and production environment, and that both environments have sufficient processing power, memory, and storage for developing the applications in scope for this SOW.
- All components of the Prominence Platform operate exclusively on-premises on Customer environments with the exception of the Extract and Configuration Consoles (hosted on Prominence servers).
Environment Requirements
- Prominence will only begin Platform implementation after all hardware, software, access and security requirements have been met. Unless otherwise specified, Customer is expected to provide and maintain all infrastructure used to support the Prominence Platform (Prominence performs support for the Platform, but not the underlying infrastructure).
- Prominence recommends at least two discrete server environments to prevent interference between development and production environments.
- Prominence assumes the Customer environments will be readily available to Prominence team members at the time of the project kickoff and all times thereafter. The Customer project lead should work with the Prominence project team to communicate all planned environment downtimes to not impact scheduled project activities.
- Prominence assumes Customer has sufficient hardware resources available and configured for data storage, data modeling, and BI Tool development, which Prominence staff will have continuous access to throughout the engagement.
- All Prominence scripts must live in their own schema, or database and cannot be migrated to another tool, platform, or other any other database outside of the Prominence Platform. Within that schema, or database, consultants and other third parties cannot have access to view or edit the scripts. This means that consultants and third parties cannot have admin or owner rights on this server, instance, or database.
- Prominence requires the SQL Server Agent Service have Read/Write/Create/Delete capability for Objects, Jobs, and Job Steps, and this same level of access to any database that will house the reporting data models, scripts, and code.
- A connection user is required for each of the external source databases and relevant tables to run extracts. This is achieved via SQL Server linked server and authenticated using the connection user. This user can be a native user on the external (linked) database or it can be done through Active Directory.
- Prominence requires an available SMTP server for sending agent job alerts. An account must be provisioned for the alerting system unless the SMTP server supports anonymous authentication.
- Prominence assumes any assigned team members will be able to access the BI Tool test/dev and production servers. Specifically, access entails:
- Each Prominence team member must have VPN access
- Each Prominence team member must have Remote Desktop access to all BI Tool servers, and any other hardware used to perform data extraction, data storage, data modeling, and BI Tool development.
- The Remote Desktop to the development server must have proper server connection tools, such as Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or Oracle SQL, and must also have proper data modeling tools, such as SSIS.
- Prominence will have access to the BI Tool Server repository via the BI Tool user account.
- Prominence assumes any assigned team members will have access to all necessary database servers. Specifically, system access entails:
- Each Prominence team member must have VPN access to the Customer network, with the ability to access local files while on the Customer network.
- Prominence requires administrative access to any SQL Server instances used for data transformation.
- Third-party contractors may not have administrative access to this instance.
- The administrative access must allow for configuration of SQL Server parameters, creation and management of linked servers, full administration of SQL Server Job Agent, and troubleshoot / trace queries for performance tuning.
- Each Prominence team member must have Remote Desktop access to the BI Tool test/dev and production servers, ETL servers and any other hardware used to perform data storage, data modeling, and BI Tool development.
- Prominence users must have administrative rights to the Windows server hosting the SQL Server to install development-related tools.
- Firewall rules must allow for outbound communication from the Data Prep Engine to the Prominence Extraction and Configuration Consoles.
- Firewall rules must allow for outbound traffic required by the bitbucket.org web service. Prominence will supply documentation of the domains, IPs and ports required by Bitbucket.
- Prominence must be able to access and download software from the following sites during Platform installation:
- Prominence requires the ability to ship Platform-related assets to environment servers prior to and during installation. This can be via Prominence Dropbox or a file-sharing service (i.e. Dropbox, Box, Citrix ShareFile) provided by the client and accessible on the environment servers.
- ETL Server Software Requirements:
- Windows Server 2016+ 64bit
- SQL Server 2016+ Standard or Enterprise Edition 64bit
- SQL Server Management Studio (latest version)
- Microsoft Excel 2010+
- ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider (64-bit)
- SQL Native OLEDB Driver
- Minimum ETL Server Hardware Requirements (total 4 drives)
- 8+ core processor
- Single environment: 64GB memory
- Dual environment: 96GB memory
- Disk Configuration: Four Disks**
- Operating System:
- Minimum Memory: 128 GB or greater
- SSD-grade read/write performance
- SQL Data Disk:
- Roughly 3 to 4 times the size of the source data (typically 250 GB – 1 TB of expandable storage)
- Dynamically expandable storage
- SQL Transaction Log Disk
- 100GB or 15% of data disk size, whichever is larger
- SSD-grade read/write performance
- SQL Backup Disk
- 50% of data disk size
- Magnetic disk or higher performance
Power BI Specific Requirements
- Customer will allow Prominence to download or otherwise make available within customer environments the free version of Tabular Editor (latest stable release). Information on Tabular Editor can be found here: https://tabulareditor.com/
**Disk space is highly dependent on initial and ongoing development plans, as well as current data volumes plus growth expectations. We highly recommend using a SAN or similarly expandable storage, so that space needs can be readily accommodated as they change. These are rough guidelines and can be refined as your storage scenario is better understood.
Prominence currently supports Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI as BI Tools. The Platform may deliver metrics, dimensions and data models to any BI tool but Accelerators are only supported on those three visualization platforms.
