Arthur's Blog

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. Read more…

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. Read more…

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. Read more…