Morgan Stanley & Co’s technology group was listening in to Red Brick Systems Inc’s recent user meeting and hears that the VPT warehouse can accommodate databases up into the 400Gb range – and that is excluding indices and scratch space, which competitors often include in their calculation of database size. Its goal is to be able to manage 1,000 users on a one Terabyte database through better segment design tools, incremental reorganization by segments, end-to-end compression, better memory management and advanced input-output technologies, as well as pushing the envelope on what is supposedly the next big area of data warehouse engine technology: life cycle aggregates. Life cycle aggregates are a database design decision to group records in a database into related aggregates, which can speed queries since the query can reference an aggregate rather than calculating a record-by-record scan, which is often unnecessary. The Life cycle aggregates theory is based on emerging research out of Stanford University in conjunction with the Industrial Affiliates program. Red Brick claims that it can jump on top of some of the innovative work coming out of academia because it is so specialized. Some Stanford advances will be incorporated into the release of VPT later this year.
