It has a whole host of technologies waiting in the wings for later in the year (CI No 2,798), but in the meantime Sunnyvale, California-based Prism Solutions Inc has delivered a point upgrade to its Prism Warehouse Manager meta data manager and Prism Directory Manager, extending the list of system support and delivering a new metadata exchange. Prism Warehouse Manager extracts and ‘scrubs’ data from legacy applications into target databases and Version 4.4 comes with new automatic source-to-target field mapping for same name source and target environments, data type support for zoned decimal data types to support warehouse field definitions, and user exit routines including statistics to track the movement of data from source to target environments. Additional system support includes Windows95 and Windows NT; DB2 Parallel Edition as a target parallel database option, Informix and Oracle as both source and target databases on Digital Equipment Corp’s AlphaServers, Unisys Corp’s Opus massively parallel system and symmetric multiprocessing servers. It ships in August and prices go from $130,000. Meantime, its Prism Directory Manager 2.5 includes a meta data exchange capability called MetaLink which establishes a common layer of meta data between Prism’s Directory Manager and data warehouse and analysis tools. Directory Manager manipulates meta data into an information directory that manages relationships between entities, provides tools for customizing views and exports selected meta data to those tools. MetaLink provides an SQL interface for accessing meta data in the information directory. It works with Brio Technology Inc’s BrioQuery, Business Objects SA’s Business-Objects, Cognos Inc’s Impromptu, Information Advantage Inc’s DecisionSuite and MicroStrategy’s DSS Agent. It ships at the end of the month and prices go from $40,000.
