Red Brick Ships Red Brick Formation
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Red Brick Systems, Inc. has announced availability of Red Brick Formation 1.3, the newest addition to Red Brick DecisionScape that is designed to provide dynamic and scalable data extraction, transformation and movement capabilities in data warehousing and analytic application environments.
Red Brick Formation enables analytic application designers and information technologists to quickly and easily create, manage and evolve complex data integration routines. These features enable companies to adapt information flow to match changing business processes and decision-makers' needs. Red Brick Formation is designed to load and transform production-scale data sets among data warehouses and data marts of any size running on Windows NT or UNIX.
The combination of Red Brick Formation with Red Brick Warehouse, Red Brick's relational database designed specifically for data warehousing, provides a superior base for building and deploying decision support projects and analytic applications. These products are integrated in the comprehensive Red Brick DecisionScape environment of products, services, methodology and partnerships for successful decision support solutions.
"A highly volatile and critical point in the evolution of a decision support project is when data is gathered, cleansed, transformed and moved among target data warehouses or data marts," said Paul Rodwick, vice president of Marketing at Red Brick. "We recognized that an extraction and transformation tool with the power and performance of Red Brick Formation would help customers speed initial data warehouse deployment. But even more valuable is Red Brick Formation's ability to simply and flexibly manage evolving data and its structure whenever business changes--in other words, all the time."
Sapphire Software develops and markets a number of software products and consulting services for the semiconductor industry, networking industry and SAP customers. Sapphire Software evaluated Red Brick Formation as a tool to extract and transform SAP data and load it into Red Brick data warehouses for high-performance analysis.
"We are very impressed with Red Brick Formation's intuitiveness and
openness as we create solutions to enable analysis for SAP customers," said
Sriram Ramani, president at Sapphire Software. "One of the key requirements
we had in selecting a data extraction and transformation tool was its ability
to take advantage of custom code we had already created. Red Brick
Formation's operators have built-in functionality to do this for us. As
well,
Formation is easy to use and has a seamless integration with Red Brick
Warehouse's loader, which makes the transformation process quick and
reliable. It also enables us to help our customers quickly take advantage of
their growing business information."
Red Brick Formation provides an intuitive, visual environment for developing and reusing complex, multi-source, multi-target transformation routines. Red Brick Formation processes data in a single pass using intelligent parallelization for maximum throughput. Its built-in transformation operators eliminate the need to write custom code which would be costly to create and maintain.
Red Brick Formation consists of a single, integrated, client-server application, which includes Red Brick Formation Architect and Red Brick Formation Flow Engine. Red Brick Formation Architect, using a familiar Windows interface, enables designers to visually define end-to-end, complex data integration processes by drawing data flow diagrams that capture business rules. Data definitions may be custom or imported from industry standard sources. Designers may choose from more than 200 pre-defined transformation and logic functions such as "duplicate deletion" and "householding." Designers may also develop custom transformations or call out to third-party programs for specialized tasks. Built-in and custom operators may be combined to solve the most challenging data preparation problems among multiple sources and multiple targets.
Once a data integration job has been defined, the designer specifies the run-time environment and allocates resources. The data integration job may then be deployed to any Windows NT or UNIX computer running a Red Brick Formation Flow Engine.
Red Brick Formation Flow Engine is a server-based component that executes the data integration jobs created using Red Brick Formation Architect. It combines the pre-built operators with custom logic and manages job execution. The Red Brick Formation Flow Engine handles large data volumes using a "one-pass" architecture that automatically takes advantage of parallelism in multi-processor machines.
Red Brick Formation version 1.3 is available for orders and will ship within 30 days. Red Brick Formation consists of Red Brick Formation Architect and Red Brick Formation Flow Engine. Pricing for Red Brick Formation Architect begins at US$7,500 per seat. Pricing for Red Brick Formation Flow Engine begins at US$50,000 for Windows NT and at US$100,000 for UNIX platforms, and is based on system configuration. Red Brick Formation Flow Engine is initially available and supported on Windows NT, Sun Solaris and HP- UX, with IBM AIX and Digital UNIX to follow shortly.
Information about Red Brick is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.redbrick.com