Boston Informix data warehousing seminar

I went to the Informix data warehousing seminar in Boston on Wednesday. It was an impressive event. Besides Informix presentations, there were presentations by a Gartner Group expert on data warehousing and presentations by Informix data warehousing strategic partners Prism and Business Objects. The Gartner Group speaker, Director Kevin Strange, mentioned that companies are spending on average $10 million on their data warehouses over five years. Meta data management is a very big topic. Everybody has lots of metadata (data about data), requiring a lot of management. You don't want to let everyone know what views of data are available. The concept of data marts appears to be essential to the success of a data warehouse. Data is replicated from the main data warehouse down to individual user data marts (running on open systems.) He has worked with large numbers of companies which have implemented data warehouses. One even has 187 people working on their data warehouse. The Informix data warehousing expert, Joanne McMath (Burlington, MA office), mentioned that Time magazine is storing 20 years of their pictures in a data warehouse. The NFL stores video clips of football plays so coaches can, for example, find out what football teams do on third down and two to go. Some firms are doing pilot data warehouses with a half TB of data. It's very important, she indicated, to know what happens the first time a disk crashes. The Informix concept of Virtual Processing gives Informix a big competitive performance over their competitors, it was said. They had excellent results with an HP 8-processor benchmark. Disk partitioning is very important to speed up performance. With disk partitioning, you skip the disk that is down or is not involved at the moment, she said. She mentioned that MCI runs their overall data warehouse on an IBM SP2 but their individual data marts on Suns. Companies initially underestimate their data warehousing requirements. A half terabyte data warehouse can grow to a 3 TB data warehouse. Financial analysts like to keep historical data going back many years on their data warehouses and this helps cause data warehouses to grow rapidly in size. Dan McGrath of Prism also did an excellent presentation on their product. He mentioned that metadata comes out of the extraction and refinement of data process. Metadata management is an important topic, he mentioned, as did previous speakers. Their new Prism Directory Manager is their product for managing metadata. This was quite a worthwhile seminar to attend. Mike W. Michael Willett, EE mwillett@storage.com Storage Computer Corp. http://www.storage.com/ 11 Riverside Street Nashua, NH 03062 Tel. 603-880-3005 :::I/O-accelerated, very fast disk arrays for all SCSI systems to 1,000 GB:::