Sun Microsystems Computer Corp will enter the data warehousing world, as it said it would, courtesy of IMS America, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvannia, which will use Sparcservers to build a prototype warehouse specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. Back at SunWorld in May, the company’s president, Ed Zander, told us to stay tuned during the second half of the year for more independent software vendor and hardware announcements (CI No 2,674) relating to warehousing. Now Dun & Bradstreet Corp’s division IMS, a provider of decision support systems to healthcare and pharmaceutical corporations, says it will develop a prototype warehouse, based on Sun Sparcservers, running Solaris 2.4 and using Oracle 7.0 as the database. Its aim is to give customers the ability to query large volumes of data and create analysis tools using its support tools. The first offering will use just one server, but IMS intends to expand it to Sun clusters over time. It chose Sun with this expansion in mind as it reckons the company is a serious player in data warehousing and because the servers maintain a high degree of parallelism and Solaris’s multi-threading can take full advantage of a parallel relational database like Oracle, something Zander alluded to at SunWorld saying it gave the operating system performance advantages over others in the data warehousing arena. IMS offers Xplorer, decision support software for pharmaceutical sales and marketing applications, which is based on a client-server architecture and had its first commercial installation on a Sun Microsystems multiprocessor system. Full roll-out of the IMS data warehouse architecture rests on this implementation.
