Inside Suning’s Data Platform: How OLAP, Metrics and Visualization Power Business

Suning’s data middle platform is a large project group composed of several core components.

OLAP is the underlying acceleration and query engine, supporting Druid, Elasticsearch, and PGCitus clusters, similar to Presto but proactively pre‑accelerates data through cube building.

Baichuan is the metrics platform that allows users to model and define metrics, providing metric query services. It mainly uses a star‑schema model, and relies on the UDMS system to define and manage over 200 dimensions and dimension tables, offering dimension information services.

Tiangong is a visual report design platform comparable to Tableau or Superset, but unlike them it builds reports based on Baichuan’s metrics and UDMS dimensions, ensuring highly standardized and unified data sources.

Huiyan is a unified report portal that publishes all reports to business users. It faces challenges in report 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, leading to manual maintenance issues, security risks, and slow response to user needs.

The data middle platform is crucial for enterprises: it transforms traditional businesses into technology‑driven companies, upgrades IT system integration to big‑data integration, and elevates tools, processes, and management to drive business operations.