Mercury Data Solutions — Your Advantage
Do you often feel that Mercury has your data "locked up" inside? Reports and exports do some things you want, but not all; you need one extra thing that the Mercury built-in reports don't provide?
Would you like to analyze your membership, see who's doing what kinds of transactions, when and where? Do you want to export some of your data to a trusted third party? Would you like to have an "instant audit" which shows you which unusual transactions were done recently?
Mercury Data Solutions (MDS) to the rescue. Released with Mercury version 5 you have the option of installing MDS on one or more of your workstations. This powerful data source comes with caveats, as you might imagine, but if you adopt MDS and agree to a few simple terms, your data dreams will shortly come true.
If you've ever taken an export from Mercury or from a Mercury report running in Crystal Reports, you know that data can be manipulated and analyzed by tools such as Excel, Access, Crystal Reports (Developer Edition), and other commonly available spreadsheets, report generators and database managers. With MDS, you can "see" Mercury's data in easy-to-read-and-understand format with information exploded from within the live, running database, yet frozen in time and external to Mercury allowing you to save, transform, cut and paste, export, sort, select, and even alter the information which came from Mercury.
Simple reports, such as loans made to certain members over periods of time or by specific persons are so easy to produce using your favorite data analysis tool that you'll likely gleefully jump in and swim around in the MDS data which you produced monthly, weekly or even daily from the live, always-running Mercury. If you were tempted to query Mercury's live database directly, you'll drop that risky habit once you've seen how clear and plain, how balanced and static your data can be. Dipping your toe into the highly compact (the technical term is "normalized") live Mercury database is a tremulous experience at best. You don't want to accidentally throw a wrench into the famously-reliable, always-on, living and breathing Mercury, do you? You want data which doesn't change while you're looking at it. You want data you can easily read and understand, which will rapidly produce the answers you need.
Of course, Fidelity offers lower-cost reports and tools using MDS. You do not have to become a database geek to gain the advantage from MDS. We'll be happy to quote and provide you with data output to your specifications. You'll need to agree to a few safety tips (and, of course, the maintenance agreement), so we'll know that you're okay and we're okay once you have this powerful data solution in hand.
MDS fulfills the promise we made when we designed Mercury to be "Tomorrow's Standard Open System." Make us proud as we watch you use MDS and our Mercury Professional Services to leverage your member data into new benefits for you and your members. Then, you'll be able to say: The System is Your Advantage.
Mercury Data Solutions Products
