How Suning’s Data Platform Unifies OLAP, Metrics, Visualization & Reporting

Suning’s Data Middle Platform is a large project group composed of several core components:

OLAP – the underlying acceleration and query engine, supporting Druid, Elasticsearch, and PostgreSQL‑Citus clusters; unlike Presto, it proactively performs cube pre‑acceleration.

Baichuan – the metric platform that allows users to model and define metrics and provides metric query services. It mainly uses a star‑schema model, with dimensions managed by the UDMS system, which currently holds over 200 dimensions and offers dimension and table information services.

Tiangong – a visualization/report design platform similar to Tableau or Superset, but built on Baichuan’s metrics and UDMS dimensions, delivering highly standardized and normalized data for reports.

Huiyan – a unified report portal where all reports are published to business users. It faces challenges in permission control and automatic matching, handling more than 4,000 reports for over 20,000 users, where a single report may be accessed by 8,000+ people, making manual maintenance error‑prone and insecure.

The data middle platform is crucial for enterprises, turning traditional businesses into technology‑driven ones by upgrading from siloed IT systems to integrated big‑data solutions, and by evolving tools, processes, and management to drive business operations.