IBM has released new Informix database software to help companies make decisions more intelligently and maximize sales opportunities while reducing expenses. With the new software, known as the Informix Warehouse Feature, global companies can both warehouse their data and conduct fast online transactions with a simplified software platform. The combination of the two capabilities in one offering can help deliver new results and insights to grow businesses and lower costs by making it easier to use existing Informix infrastructures to help clients work more efficiently.
IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) is a leading DBMS in many industries, and a strategic element of IBM's Information Management software portfolio. IDS delivers very fast OLTP performance, high reliability, and low cost administration. Additionally, Kevin Brown, chief architect for Informix, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "many customers have also started using their Informix databases as data warehouses, and have been putting in lots of manual effort to perform the tuning this requires. In response to this, IBM has released the Informix Warehouse Feature to make the process of creating a data warehouse more automated."
The Informix Warehouse Feature is a SQL warehouse tool comprised of an Eclipse design studio (for physical data modeling), a data flow operation to work as an ETL tool, and a scheduler. DBAs can use these tools to convert the schema of their Informix OLTP systems to a data warehouse star schema, and can create the output as additional tables. Feedback from beta customers indicates that this tool provides a large productivity improvement and enables them to get into data warehousing much faster.
The Informix Warehouse Feature can help companies manage their data more cost effectively with a simplified design and deployment using their existing Informix investments. Customers in all industries, including healthcare, retail and manufacturing, can take advantage of instantaneous access to information with analytical capabilities to understand market and customer trends. For example, the new software can help retailers easily access and organize data from store, web, catalog sales and internal inventory and merchandising systems to help analyze future buying trends and, in turn, make smarter business decisions.
The Informix Warehouse Feature is currently available. To learn more about the feature, go here.