Pine Cone Cultivates Web-Hosted DW
Pine Cone Systems Inc. has cultivated a Web-hosted subscription program, named Evergreen, designed to improve a company's data warehousing performance. It will provide subscribers with daily, Web-based updates regarding data warehousing activity and performance levels. In addition, subscribers will receive periodic trend analysis and specific recommendations from an online data warehousing consultant. Subscribers will also receive Pine Cone's Activity Tracker software for real-time activity and performance monitoring and analysis, along with its proactive alerting for onsite monitoring of current and recent activity.
In lieu of capital acquisition, subscribers pay a monthly subscription fee. As part of the service, subscribers will receive Pine Cone's Industry Scorecard, a periodic assessment of a company's data warehouse performance and a comparison versus others enrolled in the program. This will provide companies with an accurate, real-world comparison of how productive their data warehouse environment is.
"As e-commerce comes of age, data warehouses are squarely at the heart of the emerging technology," observes Pine Cone President and CEO, Dennis McCann. "Whether the business is online retail or a data warehousing service bureau, it is critical that businesses manage the performance of the back-end databases and devise methods of managing access to information and methods of charging accurately for the information users access. This new service moves data warehousing management and Pine Cone squarely into the burgeoning world of e-commerce and Web-based business intelligence."
Pine Cone's suite of data warehouse management tools are specifically designed to help companies proactively manage their data warehouse/data mart environments. "By using Pine Cone's Usage Tracker software, we were able to identify that 20 percent of our data warehouse tables were dormant," says Joe Lu, DBA/UNIX Administrator, Trimble Navigation Ltd. "This was very important to us, in that we saved 25 percent of our database space when migrating our data warehouse from Sybase to Oracle. It has not only reduced our effort during the migration, but it will also save us administration costs in the future. Usage Tracker also helped us to identify the highly-accessed tables, which is very helpful information for the database performance tuning," Lu says.
Pine Cone's collector technology unobtrusively captures information about who is using the data warehousing environment, what users are doing, and query performance. This usage data is sent via a secure Web link to Pine Cone's application server, where it is stored. Online consultants then create periodic reports, customized to the subscriber's environment and particular needs. Meanwhile, Pine Cone's real-time monitor helps the onsite data warehousing staff to proactively head off problems and to address any performance problems that may arise. With this system in place, Pine Cone can help the subscriber to address strategic, tactical and operational performance issues.
For more information, visit their Web site at www.pine-cone.com.