X-Set Technology Speeds Data Storage, Mining
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PC Week has reported that Startup Digital Archaeology Corp. is looking to fill in one of the pieces of the knowledge management puzzle with a new technology for storing and mining data. The architecture, dubbed X-Set, will enable developers to design structures for storing and analyzing data from a variety of sources and in a fraction of the time that traditional architectures allow.
X-Set, which includes a programming language and a processing engine, differs from traditional architectures in that it sees data as complete "sets" in their native format. As a result, IT managers can combine data from a variety of sources -- including relational, object and flat-file models -- with very little need to convert to a single model, company officials said.
By dramatically shortening the data conversion step, data warehouse designers can cut the time needed to plan a project's data structure from months to hours, officials from the Lenexa, Kan., company asserted.
Digital Archaeology's X-Set engine lets end users query the data store. Artificial intelligence incorporated in the engine analyzes the data sets and learns their interrelationships as it performs queries. Initial queries made against an X-Set data store would take longer than queries against a relational database, for instance, because the X-Set sets are not organized. But users would make up for lost time in part because setup of the data store is so quick and in part because the artificial intelligence learns the relationships of the data, which speeds processing.
Digital Archaeology will use the X-Set technology in its own products and license X-Set to third parties. The company this fall will roll out its first application, an "instant adaptive data warehouse" called Knowledge Discovery. "This (software) is solving problems for our customers that I've had sitting on the table for years," said beta tester Larry Medlin, CEO of Direct Marketing Resource Inc., a market research company in Grandview, Mo. "The extended set theory is...helping us find information that nobody has realized for years in a matter of minutes."
Knowledge Discovery runs on Windows NT, and its pricing will be comparable to that of other data warehouse solutions, officials noted. Four-year-old Digital Archaeology is backed by $8.5 million in venture and private funding.