Breaking News - SGI Unveils Adaptive Data Warehouse
SGI, a leader in high-performance computing, today unveiled SGI Adaptive Data Warehouse, a new solution optimized for Oracle data warehouses and built specifically for what SGI is calling complex decision support environments. The new solution uses technology that was first developed to deliver the performance, scalability and reliability needed for such data-intensive areas as battlefield intelligence, energy exploration, and weather modeling and forecasting.
The complex data warehouse market represents an emerging set of customers that face the same sorts of challenges once reserved for the high performance computing (HPC) arena, Ken Woo, director of enterprise data management at SGI, told 5 Minute Briefing. Customers such as online merchants who handle high-volume transactions, organizations running sophisticated pattern recognition software to catch identity thieves, and manufacturers whose complex decision support needs range from sales analysis to supply chain management have the same technical challenges as HPC, he said.
The solution, launched as part of the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative (OOWI), combines Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) database technology with SGI Altix servers and SGI InfiniteStorage systems in a platform that scales to meet the needs of customers whose requirements extend beyond the capabilities of traditional enterprise computers. “OOWI is Oracle’s response to data warehouse appliances,” Woo noted. While appliances perform the tasks for which they are designed well, he added, this approach provides end-users with greater flexibility.
“You can support mixed workloads and complex queries, and change queries,” Woo noted. Moreover, he argued, data warehousing is not compute-intensive but needs good I/O. “Altix has great memory and bandwidth,” he said.
Capable of supporting data warehouses ranging from five terabytes to more than 300TB, the SGI Adaptive Data Warehouse Solution allows organizations to conduct highly complex, ad hoc queries up to five times faster than competing platforms. SGI delivers the only Oracle data warehouse platform that allows customers to scale their I/O bandwidth to unmatched levels - without having to add unnecessary components. By leveraging the SGI Altix server architecture’s ability to independently scale I/O, CPUs and memory, customers can create a data warehouse that expands efficiently and economically as their requirements demand. The SGI Adaptive Data Warehouse solution is available now. For more information, go here.
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Information Builders Extends WebFOCUS to Provide Predictive Analysis
At its annual users conference last week, Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) systems, announced plans to deliver WebFOCUS RStat, a BI platform to enable data miners, statisticians, BI developers, and analysts to collaboratively build predictive applications for field and operational employees. Expected at year-end, WebFOCUS RStat is a statistical modeling workbench embedded in Developer Studio that enables scoring of new data on every platform and database, even in real time.
“We wanted to provide a lower cost solution for predictive analytics,” Rado Kotorov, Ph.D., director of strategic BI product management at Information Builders, told 5 Minute Briefing. As with mapping and search, Information Builders now offers its customers integration with an open source solution and a commercial solution for predictive analytics.
Based on the S language, RStat is a leading open source engine for statistical analysis and predictive analytics. S is a 4GL language for data modeling. It has been long available in the scientific computing world. Since it does analysis in memory, it had a performance disadvantage in the world of 32-bit computing. In 64-bit computing, not only has the performance disadvantage been eliminated, there are performance enhancements. Moreover, Kotorov added, Rstat is “well-known in the university world and thousands of algorithms have been developed for it.”
Integrating RStat into WebFOCUS will lead to three benefits for Information Builders customers, according to Kotorov. First, a considerable amount of time in predictive analytics is consumed in data preparation. “WebFOCUS connects to 300 data sources,” Kotorov noted. Second, it will allow data modelers and BI experts to collaborate more closely.
Finally, front-line users will be able to take advantage of predictive analytics more easily. “They will be able to put in a few parameters and see the results,” Kotorov said. For more information, visit here.
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HP Announces Updated Data Warehouse Solution to Provide Operational BI
HP has announced a new release of its HP Neoview data warehouse solution aimed at providing companies with broader access to real-time business information to improve insight and decision-making.
The new version of HP Neoview, release 2.3, includes technologies for operational business intelligence (BI) to enable customers to improve business operations and performance by putting key information into the hands of decision-makers when they require it, such as customer sales agents, for example, who need to provide the best product offers to customers, and also companies that need to quickly analyze data that can be used to combat fraud.
“Our view of operational business intelligence is around the need for companies to essentially differentiate themselves,” Vish Mulchand, director of product marketing for HP Neoview, told 5 Minute Briefing. “Operational business intelligence is a weapon.”
One of the most pressing issues in operational environments is the need to run mixed workloads, Mulchand noted. New in this release is a feature called HP Adaptive Segmentation, which automatically matches the appropriate resources to various sizes and types of queries, resulting in performance enhancements.
Additionally, the new release of HP Neoview features HP Skewbuster, which acts as a traffic coordinator for data, preventing bottlenecks before they happen. “Skewed data causes the overall query to come back slower” so the total number of queries that can be done is impacted, Mulchand explained. This technology can improve system performance, helping assure the delivery of service-level agreements and reducing the possibility of business slowdowns.
A third key feature in the new release, said Mulchand is HP Transporter. “Essentially, the Transporter allows not only a large ingest of data to come in to do the analysis, but it also allows very quick and large extracts of data.” HP Transporter helps make sure the most up-to-date information and offers are available to serve customers in real time. By extracting data as quickly as it is loaded into the data warehouse, the technology also allows security scoring of customer records, which is necessary for quickly identifying fraudulent transactions.
More information about the HP Neoview data warehouse is available here.
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Confio Launches Confio Igniter Suite PI
Confio Software, a leader in wait time database performance management tools, has announced “performance intelligence,” a new method of performance analysis that analyzes more than 13 dimensions of wait-time data to identify the source of delays for database applications. In conjunction with the announcement, Don Bergal, COO of Confio, told 5 Minute Briefing, the company has announced a major new version of the Igniter Suite called Confio Igniter Suite PI. Confio Ignite PI for SQL Server, the suite's first product, is now available.
The new version of the suite suite offers a number of new features, Bergal said, “but it also is, very importantly, more of an open system, so instead of requiring an Oracle Database as a repository as before, we have moved all that functionality over to something we call the Performance Data Warehouse on SQL Server - and so made it open and portable across multiple databases.”
Key to the Ignite PI for SQL Server is the Ignite Performance Data Warehouse, running on a non-production SQL Server system stores continuous user wait-type data gathered across production servers from multiple vendors. With an intuitive Web-based interface, DBAs can identify problems and spot trends that are contributing to poor system performance. Because it is now Web -based, said Bergal, it is accessible even for casual users, such as developers who want to check on changes that code is making in the database.
Confio Ignite PI for SQL Server is intended for sites that want to use SQL Server as the storage of the Performance Data Warehouse. The Performance Data Warehouse can be installed on Windows, Unix and Linux servers. The agentless probes install no software on the monitored databases, which can be any combination of SQL Server, DB2, Oracle and Sybase.
With the introduction of the concept of performance intelligence, noted Bergal, the company has focused on the ability “to mine the very granular wait time data that we capture from the monitored databases - with all these small bits of performance information - and then use business intelligence techniques to understand the trending and the history of that information so you get real insight into what is happening with the performance of your system.” . Free trials are available for download here. For more on Confio, go here.
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Puget Sound Oracle Users Group to Host OracleDays 2008 in July
The Puget Sound Oracle Users Group is hosting the third largest Oracle event in the Americas, OracleDays 2008, in Bellevue, WA, this summer. More than 30 exhibitors and 1,000 attendees are expected at the conference.
No longer a one-day conference, and no longer database-centric, OracleDay has become OracleDays with three days of training and a two-day conference featuring experts such as Oak Table members Kyle Hailey (U.S.), Tom Kyte (U.S.), Jonathan Lewis (U.K.), Richard Foote (Australia), and Jeremiah Wilton (U.S.), and Oracle Aces, including Hans Forbrich (Canada) and Dan Morgan (U.S.), former ANSI Committee member Joe Celko, Oracle's chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson, and a program designed to set a new standard for a regional technology event.
OracleDays 2008, will be held July 17-18, at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. It will be preceded by the three days of training held July 14-16. There will be one-day, two-day and three-day classes.
The conference will highlight many Oracle technologies and how to use them to meet real-world challenges. Tracks will include the databases (Oracle and TimesTen), Fusion Middleware, Identity Management, Applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel), Business Intelligence (Hyperion), Document Management (Stellent), Security and Governance, Maximum Availability, Infrastructure, as well as others.
Visit here for registration and information about the two-day Oracle event. Visit here for details and registration about training preceding the event.
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