Informix Corp used its Worldwide User Conference in Seattle yesterday to launch Decision Frontier Solution Suite – a group of products and technologies that it says enables users to build and manage data warehouses and data marts more easily, and for less money, than before. The suite integrates Informix’s Dymanic Server database with the company’s existing data warehouse options; Advanced Decision Support and MetaCube ROLAP, and also adds new data movement and metadata management technology from Ardent Software alongwith reporting and scheduling software from Seagate Software. It is designed to automate all a company’s data warehouse needs including OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processsing) data extraction (from a standard relational database), transformation and loading; data storage and analysis; data cleansing and centralized metadata management. Bob Walters, general manager of Informix’s data warehouse business unit said the new suite was an ideal complement to OLTP, helping users to build scalable enterprise solutions involving the rapid deployment of analytic applications of all sizes and levels of complexity. He added it was ideal for databases of any size, from small, departmental data marts to large, enterprise-wide data warehouses. Walters said the interest in data warehouses was being fueled by the increasing amounts of data being generated within enterprise environments. People want to use all that data to make money, they don’t want it to sit around not being used. And this is a great chance for us to get on that train and provide the infrastructure to let them do that, he said. The product suite, due to ship in October, supports both Windows NT and Unix environments and Walters said the fully integrated metadata version would be available in the first quarter 1999. He added that there would be industry-specific extensions to the suite over time, allowing vertical markets to write specific analytical queries to suit their particular marketplace.
á
