Ask HN: Best way to expose data in an enterprise app?

4 points by rakamotog 8 years ago | 1 comment

Hi all,

Our sales and post-sales teams get a lot of questions regarding how can they report (think Tableau) on top of the data generated by the use of our enterprise application. We currently have CSV and Excel exports for a smaller chunk(view) of data, but that seems limited.

Now to go forward, there are multiple ways, but it boils down to exposing via API or exposing via a connector (ODBC, JDBC, etc). Correct me if I am wrong here. For B2C, API hands down wins, for B2B, how should we decide which is the best route? If we did go connector route, should we shortlist one or build multiple popular connectors? Did anyone face similar predicament? Any references/links are welcome as well!

vibhubhola 8 years ago |

Exposing API is the way to go for enterprise as well, however it makes sense to have some sort of API management layer in between (APIGEE, Mulesoft, Dell BOOMi etc) if there are going to be multiple APIs to be exposed.