If you want to understand the need for data warehousing, think of a cruise missile. It has a nose cone that contains details of the terrain it must fly over to reach its target. The cone is not very big but the amount of data certainly can be. It was this requirement that led CrossZ Software Inc co-founders Mark Chroscielewski and Andre Szykier to develop algorithms to stuff Terabytes of topological terrain data into a nose cone. From there to a credit card system that compressed 30 million records into a 10Mb file on a 80286 personal computer, and the pair decided there was clearly something in this compression stuff. They called on their ancestral knowledge of Eastern Europe to set up development centers in Warsaw and Gdansk in Poland and Moscow as soon as the curtain went up and the result is QueryObjects desktop data warehousing software. Meanwhile Long Island, New York-based CrossZ last week secured its first venture funding round with $8.75m from Brentwood Associates and Wheatley Partners. The money will be used to recruit a senior management team to market the product. The company is eight years old and had its first product out three years ago, but has been self-funded until now. It has 75 employees. Chroscielewski claimed the approach was different from other data warehousing vendors in that instead of exploding the data it compresses it up to 1,000 times. The trick is, according to Chroscielewski, that Query-Objects stores equations rather than multi-dimensional arrays of information. The equations, generated on the fly from the enquiry, represent all possible answers in a 64-term polynomial form. From that equation, anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 answers can be generated and then honed further until the precise answer is reached using further equations. Chroscielewski also believes the array approach adopted by firms such as Arbor Software Inc wastes space because 80% to 90% of the answers stored are zeros, whereas QueryObjects stores just the equation. CrossZ is seeking a vice-president of marketing from somewhere like Oracle Corp or IRI Software Inc and a vice-president of engineering to free up Szykier so he can establish the Polish and Russian offices as research centers and move all development to the office in Alameda, Caifornia. The money will also be used to build a direct field service sales team as well as marketing. The QueryObjects server costs between $250,000 and $500,000 and an Object DataBase Connectivity-compliant version is available so other tools such as Brio Technology Inc’s can be used. It is up under MVS, Digital Equipment Corp OSF/1, Pyramid Technology Corp Unix and a Windows NT version is in development for release in early 1997.
