As a simple example, during the investigation we became interested in the people Henslow was using to collect plants for him. We suspected that in the early years it was mainly family and students (so-called Core collectors); in the later days he had put together a wider network of collectors (Edge collectors). When David posed the question we simply plotted the contribution of each group over time. The query took about four seconds to formulate and less than one second to produce the output shown. David had his answer.



As discussed above, in academia we often look to the open source world but in this case it wasn't an option. Engines like MySQL simply do not provide the tools necessary for this kind of analysis. The next question is, couldn’t we have achieved the same end result with other commercial BI offerings – Oracle, Cognos and/or Business Objects? We did consider them but there were two killer factors.