Data warehousing proponents argue that their breed of storage and query technologies are, for the first time, providing the means for the business end of the industry to benefit from large-scale data stores, more usually the working matter for transactional folks. Although most sections of the industry, hardware vendors, integrators and now the traditional database suppliers too, are waking up to this notion, Sunnyvale, California-based data warehouser Prism Solutions Inc believes that if non-technical managers are to use the kind of data that is becoming available with warehousing, they are going to require a new breed of query and analysis tools. Specifically tools that enable them to ask what if? rather than simply what is? Traditional executive information systems are not up to this task, argues Prism, as they generally deliver only pre-defined, pre-planned, pre-programmed tools and methods. They do not enable users to create their own query mechanisms. Meantime data warehousing, which from a bird’s eye view appears a somewhat inelegant arrangement of relational structures, index tables, catalogues of stored data – meta-data – collecting, sorting, building, navigating and query tools, could do with some rationalising itself. Until Prism introduced its Directory Manager towards the end of last year, which uses a separate relational database to store views of meta-data, only systems managers responsible for building the warehouse could actually use the meta-data. Nevertheless there is still some concern among observers that storing meta-data in a separate repository is too unwieldy because it requires the user to log on to a separate database to examine meta-data and then log on to the warehouse to submit a query. Prism recognises that there are still many loose ends in warehousing, but says it will complete the circle by teaming with data extraction, analysis, presentation and Computer Aided Software Engineering providers to build query and analysis tools for end users, presumably including the ability to issue queries from within meta-data environments.