Wal-Mart data warehouse still growing

The December 9 issue of Information Week has a feature article on Wal-Mart with a lot of material about their data warehouse. "Wal-Mart can be more detailed than most of its competitors on what's going on by product, by store, by day---and act on it." Besides their NCR Teradata databases, and six terabytes on Hitachi and IBM mainframes, Wal-Mart has 500 GB on hundreds of servers running Informix's Online Dynamic Server database. The "personality traits" of each of the 3,000 stores or outlets are used to determine product mix and presentation at each store. Wal-Mart is beginning to roll out a new data mining application based on a 4,000 processor parallel computer. The application tracks individual product sales by individual store. A seasonal sales profile is determined to predict which items will be needed in each store. Next they're going to data mine customers' total purchases to analyze relationships and patterns in customer purchases. Today, 3,500 users make 10,000 database inquiries daily. This is a well-written IW article with a lot more useful information in it. Well worth the reading. Mike Willett Storage Computer http://www.storage.com/