In-Depth

News in Brief

Real-Time Reporting Suite; Revamped Warehouse Builder

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 04/02/2003

Real-time Enterprise BI Suite Released

Iteration Software announced the release of its Real-time Reporting Suite. The company says the suite eliminates latency in enterprise information delivery by providing real-time intelligence about critical business events. The suite is built on an event-based architecture that captures data from an enterprise’s transaction stream and alerts end users.

The suite’s real-time data integration lets you access, move, and transform data from data warehouses and operational data stores, Web Services, and message queues, plus all major database servers, detects data changes or system events, into its Active Data Cache. An Event Engine monitors the data, and uses pre-configured rules to notify users via a secure instant message (currently it uses its own platform or integrates with Microsoft’s) or e-mail.

The suite includes an Active Report Engine that updates reports in real-time as the underlying data changes. Users do not need to re-query or refresh the display manually. Reports can be in cross tab, chart, graph, or columnar formats. The Active Studio component lets users create and edit reports and provides real-time collaboration capabilities (users can annotate reports and send them to others).

Ken Gardner, CEO and founder of Iteration Software, was also the founder of ReportSmith, an early report writing software program, and co-founder of Sagent, a business intelligence software company. In a discussion with Enterprise Strategies, Gardner noted that the software “takes messages as transaction data instead of using ETL [extract, transform, load] processes.” Iteration’s Real-time Reporting Suite also “has presence awareness instead of passive delivery of data,” added Gardner. The net result: faster data delivery, including real-time updates to reports.

For more information, see http://www.iteration.com

Oracle Ships Revamped Warehouse Builder

Oracle Corp. announced the general availability of version 9.0.4 of Oracle9i Warehouse Builder, an extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tool designed to help IT organizations design and build BI applications more quickly.

Warehouse Builder 9.0.4 supports both data warehouses and operational data stores, and provides visual models along with wizard-driven interfaces to help speed the design of ETL processes.

Oracle’s new Warehouse Builder is, of course, optimized for its Oracle 9i relational database management system. To that end, Warehouse Builder 9.0.4 uses the 9i runtime engine, which Oracle says eliminates the need for a separate transformation or staging server.

Oracle’s new Warehouse Builder leverages the 9i RDBMS’ integrated OLAP engine to design and manage multi-dimensional objects.

In addition to SQL data integration routines, Warehouse Builder 9.0.4 supports the Object Management Group's Common Warehouse Meta-Model, along with the eXtensible Markup Language Metadata Interchange (XMI) for meta data exchange. The new version of Warehouse Builder also supports the Processing Description Language (XPDL) for process definition.

Warehouse Builder 9.0.4 boasts support for mainframe databases and for RDMBSes from IBM Corp. Microsoft Corp. and Sybase Inc. It also features a new SAP Integrator, which generates code to extract data from SAP R/3 systems and populate data warehouses. Still another new feature is a Runtime Audit Browser, which helps ensure data quality and accuracy by exposing deployment audit and history information in order to verify the results of running jobs and reveal errors that may have occurred while loading data.

Finally, Warehouse Builder 9.0.4 includes a new Process Flow Editor that provides an interface that allows users to create ETL transformations and generate code to integrate these and other business processes within an organization.

The new version of Warehouse Builder runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows.