Column Based Analytical Technology (CBAT) has been getting a lot of attention recently in the data warehouse marketplace and trade press. Interestingly, some of the newer companies offering CBAT-based products give the impression that this is a entirely new development in the RDBMS arena. I don’t know where they have been for the last 10 years! This technology has actually been around for quite a while, and at SAND we have been working with it since 1987. But the market has only recently started to recognize the many benefits of CBAT. So, why is CBAT now coming to be recognized as the technology that offers the best support for very large, complex data warehouses intended to support ad hoc analytics? In my opinion, one of the fundamental reasons is the reduction in I/O workload that it enables.
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As a new contributor to the SAND blog, a few words of introduction are probably in order. I have been working at SAND Technology for 12 years (already!), predominantly in research & development and implementation of Data Warehouses and Intelligent Information Management systems, and I am currently Vice-President of R&D and Deployment for the company. My background is in mainframe OS system programming, mainly Assembler, and APL (my specialization at university) – a peculiar mix which should give you an idea of my age.
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To all of our friends and associates,

As we approach the end of the year, I would like to express my appreciation for your interest in and support of SAND Technology during 2007.
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We have all encountered at least one of those “Type A” individuals in our working lives: overachieving, aggressive in every aspect of a project—scope, schedule and delivery—but apt to jump quickly into taking on a new challenge, sometimes before the previous one is complete.
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Once you extend your thinking beyond the data warehouse and “free” the data to speak for itself, the potential applications of the data un-warehouse concept are virtually unlimited. Let me suggest three powerful possible applications that would offer substantial benefit:
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Starting with SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 (formerly known as “2004s”), SAP offers a new data storage option which can significantly reduce the tangible TCO of your SAP NetWeaver BI implementation while also taming those exponential storage growth charts that are keeping your data management teams up at night.
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How can we move beyond the roadblock I described in my previous post? Let’s consider a powerful and positive alternative vision of corporate data resources – let’s call it the “data un-warehouse” scenario. This can be thought of as a data management regime that is the inverse of the data warehouse: data is “deconstructed” down to its elemental structure, free of indexes, dimensional modeling and complex schemas, and retained in a manner that is cost-effective but still readily available for exploration using standard Business Intelligence tools. Such a concept would not be realized as a technology that would replace the data warehouse, but rather would guide development of a parallel infrastructure that would have the effect of keeping the data warehouse “honest” while offering an additional portfolio of powerful analytic processes.
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Over the last decade or so, data warehouses have expanded dramatically — both in size and in importance to the organizations that deploy them. The data warehouse has proved to be an invaluable means for transforming data created by production applications into information that is technically, structurally and organizationally ready for use by business managers and domain analysts. Yet like every successful technological advance, the data warehouse has its inherent limitations – and these are becoming more and more troublesome as the combined pressures of data volumes and user demands increase.
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Billed as “strategies, best practices, and instruction for teams that are running and evaluating SAP NetWeaver technology”, SAP NetWeaver BI and Portals is attended by many of SAP’s largest customers - the ones who need to keep more data, for longer, with better access, and in a more cost-effective way.
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To all of our friends and associates,

As the year draws to a close, I would like to thank everyone for their interest in and support of SAND Technology in 2006. This was an eventful year for the company, with many exciting new developments — highlighting in particular the growing acceptance of SAND Technology’s new SAND/DNA product as the leading nearline solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence.
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