Business Intelligence Lowdown

Data Warehouse Adds Power to Data Mining Tools

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

This is business intelligence at its best – software that helps you read your customers’ minds. Teradata Warehouse Miner 5.0 claims to be able to do just that. The database tool from the data warehouse provider leverages the most advanced analytic skills when used in conjunction with data-mining solutions from SAS, SPSS, Fair Isaac Model Builder and KXEN, to provide a peek into the future buying behavior of customers. According to Randy Lea, VP of products and services at Teradata, the combined solution facilitates faster model development, with runtimes becoming 25 times faster.

With the latest version of the software, improvement is promised in operations like data profiling, Analytic Data Set (ADS) generation, Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), and model management. Follow this link for more information.

Teradata Upgrades Data Warehouse

The fourth quarter this year will see the release of Teradata’s upgraded data warehouse. Version 8.2 will feature enhanced support for real-time intelligence in the form of quick and predictable high-frequency queries from front-end customer service applications. The Linux version of the database that runs on the 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell is now available. Database Trends and Applications reports:

The “active data warehouse” from Teradata can now create partitions in join indexes, acting as "alphabetical tabs" that allow the database to only look in relevant sections, and avoid the need to scan tend of millions of rows in a join index.

Oracle Ships Data Warehousing Solutions

Data warehousing solution providers can now take advantage of Oracle’s two Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g database tools that were released earlier this week, to manage data and metadata lifecycles. Release 2 is a database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool. Customers can also buy extra ETL and Data Quality options at $10,000 per CPU or $200 per user and $15,000 per CPU or $300 per user respectively. Connectors for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP come at $20,000 per connector per target application. The ETL options can be used in heterogeneous environments while the data quality options can be used for data profiling, cleansing, auto-correction, and auditing. Biz Intelligence Pipeline reports:

Oracle's new tool also reflects a trend in which the worlds of data warehouses, traditionally used for historical data, and operational databases, typically used for everyday tasks, are becoming more closely linked.

Preserving For Posterity

What with the rapid changes taking place in today's world, preserving important documents and photographs for posterity is the only way future generations will be able to gain a glimpse into the past. Which is why document digitisation company iArchives has chosen network-attached storage (NAS) solutions provider Exanet to entrust with the preservation of its historical documents and pictures. IArchives is now using the ExaStore system from NAS to archive all files related to newspapers, libraries, universities, and law companies. Data Warehouse IT Toolbox reports:

The 2-node ExaStore system supports 75 iArchives processing nodes, enabling it to handle the necessary simultaneous connections and allowing iArchives to point all of its processing nodes at the system.

New Database Modeling Tool

There's a new database-modeling tool available in the European market from the Czech Republic-based company Charomware. The latest release of CASE Studio 2, version 2.23 has been built to support the newest trends in database modeling and development. The tool packs in features that support PostgreSQL 8.1 and Advantage Database Server 8, besides being highly flexible and facilitating error fixing. It can also generate SQL scripts and detailed reports, automatically verify work, support more than 30 database systems, and customize using a template editor. The tool renders the process of database modelling simple, effective, and quick. A trial version is available as a free download on the company's website, for those who wish to sample a bite before buying the whole enchilada. If you wish to gather more information about CASE Studio 2, you can do so by following this link.

IBM Simplifies Data Warehousing

The release of IBM's DB2 Data Warehousing Edition version 9.1 marks the second phase the company's strategy to decrease the complications associated with data warehouses. While IBM introduced the balanced configuration unit (BCU) in the first strand, the second phase integrates various existing and new tools into one bundle. DB2 has two editions __ Base and Enterprise. The Base Edition will include Cube Views, Data Modeling, OLAP Modeling, and the Integrated Installer, while the Enterprise Edition will have all the features in the base edition along with the Data Partitioning feature, Query Patroller, Intelligent Miner, the web-based Admin Console Alphablox, the Design Studio (with the Data Flow and Data Mining Editors), and the SQL Warehousing Tool.

Integrated Data Warehouse From IBM

The latest version of IBM's DB2 Data Warehouse Edition comes with completely integrated data mining and OLAP tools. Version 9.1 incorporates DB2 Alphablox tools that help in building custom applications with embedded analytics, WebSphere application server, Rational development tools, and other software into the DB2 Universal Database. Biz Intelligence Pipeline reports:

In the past, DB2 Data Warehouse Edition was sold as separate components that customers assembled themselves, says Karen Parrish, VP of business intelligence at IBM.

Integrating Business and Service Data

All organizations exist for the dual purpose of providing either a service or selling a product, and most important, making profits. In a move designed to achieve that, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH), a US integrated healthcare system affiliated to the Northwestern University, has deployed a data warehouse solution from Informatica Corp. PowerCenter Advanced Edition will enhance the efficiency of the company's operations, step up corporate performance, and improve the way in which patients are cared for. Data Warehouse News reports:

ENH reportedly plans to implement PowerCenter as the foundation of a new initiative __ an enterprise-wide financial and clinical data warehouse that will be built by integrating medical and business data across the numerous departments of the organization.

Teradata Data Warehouse Heads East

ABN AMRO, the international banking services provider, will implement a data warehouse platform from Teradata, provider of enterprise analytic technologies and services, to support business development for its consumer businesses in Asia. The regional data warehouse (RDW) will first be rolled out at the bank's Taiwan branches, followed by those in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and China, to analyze customer revenue, monitor credit risk metrics, and handle customer relationship management (CRM). Data Warehouse Knowledge Base reports:

"ABM AMRO is deeply rooted in Asian financial markets," said Jim Brown, head of the Asia Consumer Client Segment of ABN AMRO. "To better serve our customers and fulfill the needs of the company's marketing management and risk control, we need a robust decision support platform. After a thorough vendor evaluation process, we decided to work with Teradata to deploy our data warehouse and CRM solution."

Enterprise Information Integration

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is being touted as the solution to the ills __ regulatory compliance, real-time business intelligence (BI), and the daunting task of converging structured and unstructured information __ plaguing the business world. EII is defined as the integration of data from multiple systems into a unified, consistent and accurate representation geared toward the viewing and manipulation of the data. It integrates the information assets of an enterprise by providing access to diverse information sources from a variety of disparate siloes of information.

Probably this definition of EII reminds you of traditional information integration techniques like ETL-oriented data warehousing and customer data integration. The difference lies in the fact that EII accesses, instead of moving the information. EII provides a consolidated view of data through virtualization techniques that hide the combined query processing system that pulls data from various sources, while ETL moves data to data repositories and data marts.  EII focuses on less data movement and transformation while combining disparate definitions of data elements using strong global query optimization. EII is not a replacement for data warehousing; it complements the technology by bringing in data from minor or non-standard sources, and presenting it to the client on demand.

Other pivotal elements of EII include metadata management and robust data modeling. Metadata supports data reusability by creating and maintaining the logic and interfaces needed to preserve virtual views of customers and products. EII tools help maintain and enhance security of metadata and data in diverse sources. The technology is vital in providing an integrated platform that blends data access standards with data about the sources and the information needs.

In a nutshell, EII aims at providing a unified, on-demand view of data by creating access to multiple and different sources of data securely and efficiently.