Sybase Inc says it has taken the systems integration headache away from companies designing and building datawarehouses, with the announcement of the general availability of its integrated datawarehouse suite, Warehouse Studio. Warehouse Studio consists of a number of fully integrated products to enable warehouse design, data transformation, metadata management, English language querying and client interface design. David Harris, Sybase business director for datawarehousing, says companies have previously needed to buy the various components from different vendors, and found themselves forced into becoming systems integrators. With Warehouse Studio, he claims they buy an integrated framework, which also enables third party applications to be plugged in, so if someone already has a transformation tool, or a warehouse design tool, they can use that within Warehouse Studio. The Studio comes with Sybase’s Adaptive Server IQ database and English language query tool, but Harris insists customers do not have to use the Sybase database, the Studio will support links to Oracle, DB2 and other industry databases. The Warehouse Studio includes Sybase’s Power Designer and the metadata management software it acquired earlier this year with its purchase of Intellidex Systems LLC (CI No 3,342). It also incorporates Ardent Software Inc’s PowerStage transformation software, and WhiteLight Systems Inc’s relational OLAP product can be bought as an optional extra (CI No 3,387). Warehouse Studio costs from $76,200 on Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Digital Unix, and from $61,000 on Windows NT.
