A data source is anywhere your data lives that a BI tool can read: a database behind your application, an ERP or accounting package, a CRM, an advertising platform, a shared spreadsheet, a data warehouse. Each is connected once — with a read-only login — and from then on its tables are available for dashboards, reports and questions without anyone exporting anything.
Most businesses discover they have more sources than they thought. A hospitality group might count its point-of-sale, its reservations system, its rota software, its purchasing platform and the finance team’s spreadsheets: five sources for a single Tuesday. The value of BI comes from putting them side by side, so labour cost sits next to covers and food cost next to menu sales, in one place rather than five tabs.
Data source, connector and connection are often used interchangeably, but they differ. The source is the system itself. The connector is the ready-made link a tool provides for that kind of system. The connection is your specific configured instance — this database, that account — including whether it is read live or imported. When someone asks “how many data sources do you support”, they usually mean connectors.
In Klayara, 50+ data sources are supported, from databases and warehouses to files, spreadsheets and business apps, and any of them can be related to any other on the same dashboard. Browse the connectors.