NCR Adds OLAP Services to Extend and Expand Decision
Support Capabilities of Teradata Database
ACTION ITEMS
NCR Corporation announced that it has added Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Services to its Teradata relational database. NCR's Teradata OLAP Services provide customers with tools that can be used to perform multidimensional analysis to discover hidden information within the database.
Teradata OLAP Services will be provided by a new database feature, TeraCube, and by Teradata Structured Query Language (SQL) extensions for OLAP and data mining. In a data warehouse environment, analysts, knowledge workers and managers use OLAP technology to get rapid responses to complex analytical questions. The Teradata OLAP Services are part of NCR's Teradata Release 3, scheduled to be available in late 1998.
NCR today also announced a licensing agreement with Geppetto's Workshop L.L.C. for its patented, dynamic query generation technology, The Ant Colony, for use in NCR's OLAP Services.
"We have focused our resources on taking Teradata to higher and higher levels of performance -- and in ways that can be leveraged by third party tool vendors," said Mark Hurd, vice president of marketing for NCR's Computer Systems Group. "We will continue to build on our leadership position in the data warehouse market by adding new levels of functionality in order to provide a decision support environment that is far superior to any other competitive offering in the industry."
Teradata OLAP Services are designed to provide an open foundation for tools and solutions provided by NCR's many third-party partners. These capabilities are accessed through industry-standard interfaces, including first with the Microsoft OLE DB for OLAP specification and later with the MDAPI Release 2 from the OLAP Council.
"By providing OLAP functions specifically designed for Teradata through a set of open interfaces, we are giving our partners the ability to substantially improve performance. Those performance improvements will come in the areas of end-user scalability, access to large data sets, and rapid retrieval of business information," said Dan Harrington, vice president of data warehouse marketing for NCR's Computer Systems Group.
NCR partners who are currently working with NCR to provide support for Teradata OLAP Services include Brio Technology, Business Objects, Cognos, Hummingbird Communications, and Microsoft.
"By combining market leading business intelligence tools from Cognos and the power of NCR's TeraCube OLAP engine with the Teradata database using industry-standard interfaces, NCR is building the strongest possible solution for its customers," said Paul Hill, Cognos' vice president, Strategic Partners and Marketing Programs.
The new parallel OLAP extensions to Teradata SQL, available in Teradata Release 3, will markedly improve the performance of OLAP tools and applications that take advantage of their availability. They include:
TeraCube forms the core of NCR's new OLAP Services and provides a unique approach to generating information for business users: SQL is dynamically generated from the dimensions of a user's inquiry using specialized database navigation technology and standard programming objects. These capabilities are provided by The Ant Colony under the licensing agreement with Geppetto's Workshop L.L.C.
"We are pleased to formalize our relationship with NCR and to have the opportunity to provide Teradata users with these unique capabilities," said John Grace, president of Geppetto's Workshop. "The combination of our query technology with the power and scalability of Teradata significantly increases the performance and flexibility available to OLAP developers, administrators, and users."
With TeraCube, OLAP data structures are created dynamically from detail data, providing an environment that is more responsive to changing business needs than traditional, static OLAP databases. TeraCube provides analytical capabilities without the restrictions typically imposed by OLAP servers, and uses The Ant Colony's patented database navigation technology called Dynamic Table Selection(TM) (DTS) to create multi-dimensional data on an ad hoc basis.
The TeraCube hybrid OLAP system takes advantage of the benefits inherent with multi-dimensional data cubes. And, it also contains an integral, true ad hoc query system that provides transparent access to transaction level data by dynamically generating data cubes.
NCR's partnership with Hummingbird enables the two companies to offer a complete business intelligence solution, allowing their mutual customers to ask specific questions from their corporate data, visualize answers, analyze business data, and share results across the enterprise.
"The addition of OLAP functionality to Teradata solidifies NCR's status as a leading data warehouse provider," said Ron Spencer, Vice President of Research and Development for Hummingbird's Business Intelligence Group. " This is extremely good news for our many joint customers, who can expect the same level of tight integration between TeraCube and Hummingbird PaBLO that they now have with Teradata and Hummingbird GQL."
And, Steve Murchie, data warehousing product manager at Microsoft, comments, "NCR's use of the OLE DB for OLAP interface to TeraCube ensures that Teradata customers are able to use the widest possible range of third-party client tools and decision-support applications. As NCR continues to build on its leadership position in data warehousing, the use of such standard interfaces will allow NCR and Microsoft to further develop their strategic alliance, and jointly bring to market exciting new products."
TeraCube provides performance enhancements for complex ad hoc queries involving multiple database tables, as well as complex comparisons between tables. Using elements of TOP END middleware, it also provides the flexibility to support large numbers of end users by automatically load leveling across multiple middle-tier servers, and providing fail-over capabilities in the event of a hardware failure.
Geppetto's Workshop is a privately held firm with headquarters in Hinsdale, IL. Founded in 1991, they specialize in developing innovative data access technology, components, and solutions for the relational and the multidimensional database markets. More information on Geppetto's Workshop and its products and services can be found on the World Wide Web at: http://www.geppetto.com
Teradata provides scalability from 10 gigabytes to more than 100 terabytes, seamless connectivity and the lowest administration requirements of any database on the market. It employs a patented shared-nothing MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture that can be deployed on both SMP (symmetric multi-processing) and MPP hardware platforms. Teradata runs on UNIX, and will be available on Windows NT and Sun Solaris. Visit the NCR Teradata web site at http://www.ncr.com/teradata
NCR Corporation is a leader in scalable data warehousing, self-service and store automation solutions for the retail, financial and communications industries and other select markets. NCR's solutions are built on the foundation of the company's long-established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, hardware technology, global customer support services and a complete line of consumable and media products. More information on NCR and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at: http://www.ncr.com