IT ORGANIZATIONS GEAR UP FOR DATA BUILDING

PC Week has reported that the data warehousing market is enabling a new round of choices for IT organizations looking for ways to manage their data. Oracle Corp., Informix Software Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are rolling out products for designing, building and using data warehouses.

Oracle will be producing a design tool called Warehouse Builder, plus analytic application strategy and warehousing improvements in its Oracle8i database. It is also expected to generate an interface for exchanging metadata in heterogeneous environments that it intends to submit to the Object Management Group standards body. The proposed standard, called Common Warehouse Metadata, has support from several dozen vendors, sources informed PC Week.

Common Warehouse Metadata is an answer to Microsoft's Open Information Model, which is supported by more than 60 vendors and serves as the spine of Microsoft Repository 2.0, which ships with SQL Server 7 and Visual Studio 5.0. "People are not waiting for a standard and shouldn't wait for a standard because it's going to be a long time coming," said Wayne Eckerson, an analyst at The Data Warehousing Institute, in Gaithersburg, Md. "Most people get by with islands of metadata, which makes managing a warehouse more difficult."

Oracle8i, which Oracle will ship by year's end, will include such warehousing features as materialized views for dimension hierarchies, more partitioning capabilities and top/bottom queries, which return high and low values. Oracle officials declined to make official comment on these matters to PC Week.

Meanwhile, Informix has already made a splash with the shipment of Decision Frontier, a decision-support suite built on its Dynamic Server database and aimed at the high-end warehousing market. The Menlo Park, Calif., company also said it will port its MetaCube ROLAP (relational online analytical processing) engine to Oracle databases this year, with versions due next year for Microsoft and Sybase Inc. databases, as well as the data warehouse from Red Brick Systems Inc., which Informix is acquiring.

In addition, Informix will ship this year a new product called Decision FastStart for constructing data marts from Baan Co. enterprise resource planning applications. Similar data mart solutions are in the works for products from PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP AG. Informix also has partnered with Seagate Software Inc. to integrate Seagate's Holos development environment with Dynamic Server, which will be accomplished by the end of the year.

Microsoft, for its part, announced last week fortification of its Data Warehousing Framework, a technical road map built on the OLE DB data connectivity standard and SQL Server 7 components for metadata management, OLAP and data movement. The Redmond, Wash., company said it has the support of 20 vendors for this framework.