SAP is the third fastest growing BI vendor on the planet, and they’ve got designs on being the planet’s largest BI vendor. But they’ve got a cumbersome data structure, said Jerry Shatner, EVP at Sand. SAP qualified Sand’s software last December for use with its SAP NetWeaver BI tools.
Shatner said that the other giants of the BI market are Cognos and Microsoft. They don’t have designs on the data-warehousing market, and they don’t recognize their [repository] limitations, Shatner claimed. Microsoft, with its SQL Server, may argue differently.
Sand’s software is intended as a near-line repository into which customers can export infrequently-used data from their ballooning operational databases. The company says that its repositories will then feed data to analytics engines much faster than conventional databases, while also using less disk space, and allowing load and go queries that can be created without any knowledge of database layout.
Offloading into nearline repositories should help keep databases at a manageable size. Analyst the Enterprise Storage SG has forecast 79% CAGR in tier-two database volumes between now and the end of the decade.
The Sand repositories can feed analytic engines via standard JDBC, ODBC or SQL queries. We’d like to be the place where corporations store all their operational data for feeding to any analytics application, said Shatner. For now, Sand is targeting SAP’s 10,000 data warehouse users to augment its current 60-strong customer base.
Sand’s software is not an alternative to database pruning tools such as those developed by OuterBay Technologies Inc, the company that is soon to be bought by Hewlett-Packard Co. Outerbay’s software simply identifies the data that is best moved out of live databases, and can use repositories such as those from Sand as a target.
Sand claims that its DNA – Dynamic Nearline Architecture – Analytics 2.2 software uses around 65% of the space of the data as originally formatted, but without compressing data.
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Whereas an Oracle database would occupy double or triple the space, Shatner said. Sand’s other product, DNA Access 2.2, does compress data. It uses the same method of laying out data as Analytics 2.2, but because of its compression it consumes only around 5% of the space of existing databases, Sands claimed. While Analytics 2.2 is aimed at tier-one data marts, Access 2.2 is aimed at tier-two repositories.
Added to the lower consumption of disk space, Sand also claims to outstrip other the performance of other databases, because its software operates on compressed bit-vectors without ever opening them up.
