Walmart's suppliers access its data warehouse

I just received my audio cassette of the data warehousing session at the New York Financial Technology Expo conference a few weeks ago. The panel included an Informix representative and some senior executives with their own big data warehouses. It was noted that Walmart has expanded dramatically in large part to the competitive advantage it has gained with its leading edge data warehouse, versus what K Mart has been doing. It was said that even Walmart's suppliers (vendors) access its data warehouse. The MCI data warehouse was said to be growing at about 50 GB a month. A panelist said that MCI has vast information in their data warehouse on their customers, including the friends and family program they have. A banking application discussed was fraud detection where customers are called up on the phone when their credit card purchases depart from their usual patterns, either by zip code or type of purchase. Mike Willett Storage Computer http://www.storage.com/ http://www.storage.com/informix.html