Ad-hoc Data Analysis

The data in your computer systems is a highly valuable asset. Unfortunately, you usually have a restricted view of it within the context of an individual application system.

Businesses are increasingly looking to perform ad-hoc interrogation and analysis across all of their data assets to capitalise on its value.

By its very definition, ad-hoc investigation is unstructured and incremental. Analysts do not necessarily know what questions they need to ask, and answers to previous questions generate new questions based on their findings.

They often do not know what they are looking for until they find it which makes it impossible to design a reporting system to meet an undefined need. Even if you do the know the questions, the impact to IT is significant requiring an expensive bespoke system to be created, which generally is too expensive and/or takes too much time to implement.

X88 Pandora - revolutionary data interrogation and manipulation software

Freedom to interrogate the enterprise

Here are some examples of questions that are difficult to answer:-

  • Where else does this bank account appear across all our systems?
  • Where else do we store information that looks like passport numbers, or email addresses?
  • Do we have gender codes anywhere which are not M or F?
  • Are there any beneficiaries of life policies that happen to be employees?
  • Do we have information about another person with similar characteristics as this one?
  • Is anyone trying to disguise a name, e.g J0hn instead of John?
  • Are there any unusual dates anywhere in any of my systems?
  • Have call centre staff embedded comments in places they should not have?

This type of investigation either generally does not get done, or it relies on repeated help from the IT department over a lengthy period of time.

With X88 Pandora you can now open up all your enterprise data to real-time interrogation, exploration and analysis in an ad-hoc, incremental way without the need for any pre-determined design. Just take raw data from however many sources you need, and immediately start interrogating and manipulating the data to get the answers you need, regardless of the data volumes and without impacting your IT department. Work collaboratively with others to save time, sharing everything that you do.

X88 Pandora - Non-matching customers and purchases Analysing Customer and Purchases
X88 Pandora - Orders by non-existent customers Orders by non-existent customers

Key Features

  • Navigate and browse through all data in real-time regardless of data volumes
  • Sort, filter, combine, group and aggregate data with no technical skills
  • Graphically define and test business rules against your data
  • Identify, quantify and investigate anomalies, outliers, suspicious cases and other data surprises
  • Chase the rabbit - follow hunches, discover and traverse relationships across enterprise data
  • Perform context-free fuzzy matches for anything across the enterprise
  • Tell Pandora what to look for, and it will find it no matter how many tables are involved
  • Intelligent security allows you to work collaboratively whilst still maintaining confidentiality
X88 Pandora non-existent customers report Non-existent Customers Report


This is an example exported report produced in a few minutes from raw data, where we compared Customers and Valid Purchases, found all the Purchases made by non-existent Customers, and enhanced the result with additional information such as the time span involved, number of orders involved, etc.