IBM Corp has rolled out the second of its RS/6000-based packaged solutions in the form of a four-way server stuffed with everything it thinks you’d need to build a data mart, or application-specific data warehouse. $300,000 buys the server with 500Mb RAM and a couple of gigabytes of disk with Sybase Inc’s high-speed query Sybase IQ 11.1 database, Carleton Corp’s Passport data extraction software, a choice of Brio Technology Inc or Business Objects SA access and query design tools, plus installation and training. The software bundle is essentially a version of the QuickStart Data Mart package Sybase put together for use on various Unixes in September last year when the two companies teamed on Data Mall solutions; collections of data marts running in Sybase MPP on an SP parallel RS/6000. IBM says Sybase IQ bitwise index technology is suited for high-speed query, read-only decision support-type applications. It is not good for OLTP, having no transactional capability. That’s why there will be other packaged RS/6000 solutions for data warehousing and at least two for OLTP. IBM hopes to ship several hundred of the data mart bundles. It claims to be taking exhaustive and expensive evaluation tasks away from the user by choosing the best data mart products and integrating them in a ready-to-run system. If you believe what the analysts say then expect the market for data marts to grow to be as big as the OLTP segment.
