CellStore Documentation

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What is CellStore

CellStore is a Solution for managing and analysing highly flexible, yet strictly governed data. It is in particular well suited for data that has been defined using the generic XBRL Standard or the Inline XBRL dialect (iXBRL). However, it is not limited to these standards because it abstracts the mature data model behind these standards into an abstract infoset.

Get started

To get started with CellStore, we suggest to follow these steps:

  1. Get in touch with our Reportix Sales Team to get a demo license and to get access to our private Docker registry.
  2. Follow the installation instructions to get CellStore up and running in a couple of minutes.
  3. Follow the Get Started Tutorial to get a first impression of CellStore Rest API and Admin UI
  4. Use our API docs to build impressive data driven applications using e.g. Java, C#, or Excel.

Main Advantages of CellStore

Free Up Your Database Maintenance Resources

In mainstream relational database systems or data warehouses the user has to define the physical data structure before loading or analyzing the data. Managing database schemas for an ever changing data model can be very costly and labor intensive and is impossible if the data structure is only known at load-time.

Using mainstream relational database systems or data warehouses you would need to:

  1. Consider only part of the data (and hence lose information).
  2. Abstract the data (and pay a high perfomance penalty).
  3. Apply virtually infinite maintenance efforts.

In contrast, CellStore handles heterogeneous data natively and maintenance-free. When data is imported, CellStore also imports its schema and represents it as a taxonomy. Data schemas (aka taxonomies) are strictly separated from the data (“cells”) itself and therefore, can be evolved independently of the data.

Analyze Heterogeneous Data

CellStore stores data as cells in a large pool of data. These cells can be very heterogeneous, but still are type-checked, and can be verified and validated. By storing the schema in form of taxonomies separately from the data, you can view the same data using different views.

Exchangeable Storage Layer

CellStore uses database virtualization techniques to make the storage layer exchangeable and exploit the different strengths of database systems. Currently, CellStore supports the open source MongoDB and the enterprise grade MarkLogic NoSQL databases as storage layer.

Easily Scalable

CellStore is a lightweight stateless middleware that allows virtually infinite horizontal scalability. For example in a server cluster CellStore instances could be elasticly scaled out.

Run Anywhere On Commodity Hardware

Because CellStore is shipped in Docker containers it can run in various environments, such as Windows or Linux, without any installation nightmare for dependencies. Various tools for the CellStore are also available in separate Docker containers. However, - if required - CellStore and its tools can also be shipped as JAR. All of these can be run on inexpensive commodity hardware.