Hunter

Challenge

Generally, users needed a tool that would allow them to query a database and get the output to Excel without knowing the technical details about the database (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) and the particulars of SQL. Customers understand the informational aspects of their data; they should not have to learn the I.T. technical knowledge in order to get to that data and make it work for them.

Project Goals

• Hunter training should take less than 15 minutes
• Solution should scale across users and different databases
• User protected from all technical details of database (focus on information not technical details)
• Ability to Save Queries for recurring use
• Share queries with other users to make new users immediately productive
• Ability to send query results to multiple output formats (Excel, Word, Web, etc.)
• Auto-Run (run every X minutes) queries that can be used to monitor operational database

Our Solution

Cyberwolf Software created Hunter a web application that uses a drag and drop interface to allow a non-I.T. user create appropriate and accurate SQL queries against their datasets. Hunter's interface is uniform regardless of the database and structure of the underlying data. This allows a user to learn Hunter once but use Hunter as a tool for other datasets. Hunter scales since it is web-based. It includes functionality for exporting queries to different outputs, saving queries for re-use, sharing those queries with other users; and, polled (auto-refresh) monitoring.

Results

By far, Hunter is Cyberwolf Software's most successful product. It is used in the Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Agricultural industries. It is also used in Private Education, Behavioral Health and Child Disposition Cases. This is the third major version of Hunter. Our first version was deployed two decades ago. Many of those original customers still use Hunter today. Expansion of Hunter to other databases and customers has occurred through the user base. We believe Hunter is an excellent example of the focus Cyberwolf Software has on the types of solutions that it designs and builds for its clients.