Los Gatos, California-based Red Brick Systems Inc has drawn up an architectural blueprint for companies seeking to implement data warehousing applications on everything from massively parallel processing systems all the way down to desktops, and has announced new revisions to its core products, plus new low-end offerings to reflect the plan. Red Brick has added version 3.5 of its Warehouse VP parallel relational database software that it claims improves the performance of data warehouse applications running on seven Unix systems (CI No 2,657) . Where VP was capable of providing linear performance increases with every additional processor for warehouses up to 150Gb in size last year, the company claims the latest version has already been tested against warehouses with up to 360Gb data running on a 10-way HP T500 server. Version 3.5 includes support for intermediate level Case, Intersect and Except ANSI 92 querying, dynamic optimisation of query execution based upon the examination of preliminary results and assessing the best route to completion, and performance enhancements for very large sites. It is out now priced from $37,500. Red Brick is also offering an extended version of the product for massively parallel systems with over 1Tb data called Warehouse XPP, which is said to ensure query performance isn’t eroded when users are added.
Stand-alone
It offers single-node administration and application partitioning across multiple nodes and is aimed at customers with large systems supporting multiple nodes wishing to assign groups of those nodes to different applications, such as marketing or sales. XPP is already up on IBM RS/6000 SPs and will be available on Unisys Corp’s Opus massively parallel processing system from November. Prices go from $50,000. The company has also announced warehouse co-ordination and control software for query monitoring and control, security and administration, copy management and metadata management; licences start at $15,000. It has also created a low-end version of its software called Warehouse for Workgroups of stand-alone or networked databases up to 5Gb in size with less than 30 users with the sweet spot being around 15 users. It sees the product being used by firms seeking to hive off subsets of a larger warehouse set up for more extensive analysis by internal departments or as a way for companies to evaluating data warehousing. The software includes a single implementation to create just two data warehouse databases on a server. Parallel features of the full-fat Red Brick system such as loading and querying, are available as options. A single-user version costs $12,000 with prices rising to $30,000 for 30 users.
