The cacophony surrounding data warehousing is getting louder and louder, and last week Sybase Inc came to town to announce that it now has 50 members in its Warehouse Works Alliance Programme, which it launched last year. Some of the latest members are Dun & Bradstreet Information Services, Electronic Data Systems Corp’s new division dbIntellect Technologies and Price Waterhouse Management Consulting Services. Of course, some of the 50 companies – Evolutionary Technologies Inc and Prism Solutions Inc to name just two – appear as names quoted by Sybase’s rivals as members of their own data warehouse gangs. But as each database company scrambles to establish a lead in the burgeoning data warehouse business, companies that offer access tools or automated data transformation would be foolish to put all their eggs in just the one warehouse. Nevertheless, Sybase said its alliance offers 125 tools from which it and its partners can build the data warehouse suit anybody’s needs. Where it, as an individual company, believes it has a clear advantage is in IQ Accelerator, its data query tool, up to its third version, which it believes will change the face of data warehousing and which will be released by the end of October when it will have the name Sybase IQ. The company has made some very ambitious claims about the product, such as saying it increases query responses by up to 516 times over SQL Server alone, and up to 240 times compared with queries on DB2 running on the mainframe. Sybase picked up IQ Accelerator with its acquisition of Expressway Technologies Inc of Waltham, Massachusetts, back in October 1994 (CI No 2,535). IQ uses something called Bit-Wise technology that enables data of all kinds to be represented as bits in a bit-map, circumventing the need for table scans using conventional ‘B-Tree’ balanced tree indexing.
Cracked the nut
This has the advantage of reducing the size of indexes by as much as 80%. But more importantly, it speeds queries because rather than searching through the whole database, as one would do on a parallel database when an SQL command is fired off, Sybase IQ effectively looks for patterns made by the bit-maps. And Sybase said it has cracked the nut of representing high cardinality tables in a bit-map format and has applied for a patent to cover this. Harry Cochrane, former chief executive with Express Technologies, and now vice-president of Sybase’s advanced indexing products, said users could even regenerate raw data from the Bit-Wise indexing, raising the question of whether a data warehouse need even hold the raw data. And he claimed that the regeneration was 100% accurate. He also claimed that the product meant that databases could go for longer without being refreshed and that any refresh would be far faster as data could be whacked onto the end of any bit-map, rather than tables having to be rebuilt. There are two upgrades pencilled for 1996 that will deliver internationalisation and enable queries to be made across multiple databases running in heterogeneous environments. There will also be an optimiser for reducing time to reach data. The second update will include a heuristic tool to aid data analysis. The 16-strong team, based at Expressway Technologies’ old base in Burlington, Massachusetts, expects to produce associated products for use with text retrieval, SQL workgroup and desktop access tools. Cochran expects IQ Accelerator to sell for between $40,000 to $50,000.
