Informix May Strengthen Warehousing Capabilities
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PC Week has reported that users of Informix Software Inc.'s OLTP database could get stronger data warehousing capabilities as the result of the company's purchase of Red Brick Systems Inc. The $35 million deal, announced early this month and expected to close by year's end, will likely result in new decision-support and data movement capabilities for users of Informix's Dynamic Server database, although integrating products from the two companies may not be easy, observers said.

"The plus is they [Red Brick] have strong data warehousing; the negative is trying to pull together the different products," said Judy Davis, an analyst at Database Associates International Inc., in Marion, Mass. Informix officials promised some sort of integration between the two companies' products but would not elaborate on whether Informix intends to blend the pair into a single database.

The companies' flagship products, Informix's Dynamic Server and Red Brick Warehouse, will continue to be offered and supported separately for the time being, said officials at Informix, of Menlo Park, Calif. Red Brick Warehouse is based on a star schema model ideal for decision-support data warehousing and is not suited for high-end OLTP (online transaction processing), which has been the strength of Informix Dynamic Server.

One Red Brick product, a data movement tool called Formation 1.3, eventually will be integrated into Informix's Decision Frontier decision-support suite, although no time frame has been set, officials said. Also in the suite will be similar extraction, transformation and loading software from Ardent Software Inc.

Other Red Brick products as well will be blended into Decision Frontier, which includes Dynamic Server with parallel and decision-support options, the Informix MetaCube ROLAP (relational online analytical processing) engine; and the Crystal Info front-end OLAP tool from Seagate Software Inc., officials said.

Liberty Mutual Group, which has both Dynamic Server and Red Brick Warehouse deployed in Portsmouth, N.H., stands to benefit from the deal, said Jay McLaughlin, a Liberty project manager. "We think this potentially has the ability to be a great mix for us," McLaughlin said. "This can give us the best of both products."

Data warehousing pioneer Red Brick, of Los Gatos, Calif., lost $10 million in the first half of this year.