Pilot Software Inc’s multi-dimensional database, Analysis Server, will get an injection of relational technology this spring when the company announces its StarGate product. With Stargate, customers will be able to mix and match relational and multi- dimensional queries. Stargate will monitor which queries are used most heavily, so an administrator can decide whether to run them against a relational database or Analysis Server. Using Stargate’s guide to heavy-hitters, a database administrator then decides what queries need to be summarised in advance each day by Analysis Server – perhaps sales of a certain brand for a certain region. If you summarize all sales figures, you will end up with gigabytes of data, that eat up large amounts of storage space. And if you don’t summarize enough figures, a user’s ad-hoc query takes an age to run, as the software has to run around summarizing figures. The solution, says Pilot, is a bit of both – store some data in a relational database, and feed some into Analysis Server which will summarize it. Pilot is planning to announce Stargate in spring for Oracle Corp and Microsoft Corp SQL Server databases. Informix Software Inc and Sybase Inc releases will follow later in the year. Stargate is the culmination of a two-year engineering project based in the company’s two UK centers in Stafford, Staffordshire and Chertsey, Surrey. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Pilot Software, is part of Cognizant Corp, one of three free-standing companies that Pilot’s parent Dun & Bradstreet Corp split itself into last year (CI No 2,827).
