Data warehouser Red Brick Systems Inc says it is has been unable to continue its discussions with Expressway Technologies Inc since Sybase Inc swallowed the unit back in October. Los Gatos, California-based Red Brick had hoped to partner with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Expressway and use Expressway’s bit-map indexing mechanism for high speed, ad hoc, querying against its database, just as Sybase is doing with its IQ Accelerator (CI No 2,563). Red Brick says it will either have to buy or develop similar software. It reckons it can have something similar ready to announce by the end of the first quarter next year. It says it is not perturbed by Sybase’s entry into data warehousing – or the expected rash of other newcomers – and in view of Sybase’s performance estimates, ludicrous in its view, says that data warehouse users will always require B-tree indexing for certain types of queries, in any case. Red Brick, which intends to remain 100% a data warehouse company, is planning new data extraction, systems management and data ‘cleansing’ additions to its software line. With new staff hired from AT&T Global Information Solutions’ Teradata unit and the University of Michigan, Red Brick believes it has acquired the skills to take its products forward. It is lining up one of the major hardware vendors to offer its software in the UK from next quarter, then around Europe from later on in 1995.
