MICROSOFT TRIES TO EASE DATA WAREHOUSING

Talk about an awesome responsibility. If We're Entertainment Inc. were to ship "South Park" Cartman dolls to a store where young customers were expecting Winnie-the-Pooh toys, the dolls might scar some little minds for life.

That's the danger We're Entertainment faces each day as the retailer tries to stock its 35 stores with the right mix of celebrity memorabilia from its catalog of 20,000 items.

To avoid inflicting traumas, We're Entertainment's IT director, Jim Priestly, is about to go into production on a data warehouse that company executives will be able to use for quick, accurate analysis of sales and inventory trends. The data warehouse replaces a DOS-based transactional system that forced executives to stitch together multiple reports.

"We didn't get the big picture--only a lot of little pictures," Priestly said.

Priestly decided to base the warehouse on Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 7.0 RDMBS (relational DBMS). SQL Server is less expensive to license than some competing databases, and the 7.0 version includes OLAP (online analytical processing) services that the Flemington, N.J., company will use in conjunction with front-end data analysis tools from Knosys Inc. that plug into the OLAP foundation.

"It really improves our ability to track merchandise. We can analyze our decisions before and after we make a change to see whether or not we're making good choices," Priestly said.

If companies such as We're Entertainment are any indication, Microsoft is making progress in its attempts to convince data warehousing newcomers that SQL Server 7.0 is an affordable, easy-to-deploy platform for mission-critical decision-support applications. Although SQL Server 7.0 began shipping in January, there are signs it's already gaining favor, particularly among cost-conscious IT managers at smaller companies.

But Microsoft still has work to do. Compared with competitors such as Oracle Corp. and IBM, the company is late to the data warehouse market. With Windows 2000 still not available, some IT managers remain concerned about the scalability of Microsoft's platforms, including SQL Server 7.0. And the database--even with OLAP--still lacks some features important to data warehousing, such as advanced indexing, date stamping and advanced data transformation services.

Already No. 3 in data warehousing market share, Microsoft officials in Redmond, Wash., are sounding characteristically confident. They predict that in 12 months, SQL Server 7.0 shipments for new data warehousing applications will match the level of Oracle8i shipments.

The Microsoft message isn't all bluster: Since SQL Server 7.0 started shipping, the company has made some progress in selling the product, particularly with smaller companies that balked at the expense of warehouses and data marts. But Microsoft is still the underdog in this market as it works to change the thinking of companies skeptical about SQL Server's past reputation of being unable to handle large databases.

Data analysis on a budget

The OLAP server engine bundled with SQL Server 7.0 gives business managers a foundation on which to add graphical tools to simultaneously slice and dice a variety of data points for multidimensional analysis. For companies such as We're Entertainment, the alternative is to cajole someone from IS to write database queries that produce a handful of separate reports rather than a single integrated view of sales, inventory and financial information. Worse, database-query reports can take hours, days or weeks to create.

All major DBMS vendors, including Oracle and IBM, sell an integrated OLAP server, but customers often pay dearly for them. For example, IBM's DB2 OLAP Server, which comes with Visual Warehouse development tools, sells for a base price of $25,000. "It's hard for [Microsoft competitors] to compete with a price point of zero," said Doug Hackney, an analyst with Enterprise Group Ltd., in Hudson, Wis.

That has helped some data warehousing newbies get started with minimum cost. Take sales and marketing outsourcing company MarketStar Corp., of Ogden, Utah, for example. The company built a data mart for a trifle--$75,000. MarketStar uses the mart to support a field sales force that's dedicated to one of the company's biggest accounts, Hewlett-Packard Co. The MarketStar sales staff, which spends most of its time promoting HP products to computer superstores, uses HP 660LX handhelds equipped with 56K-bps modems to send sales statistics and competitor pricing information to a dual-processor Pentium server running SQL Server 7.0 at MarketStar headquarters.

There the data is analyzed by managers. The data mart lets MarketStar track HP products by type, region and field rep, even if the data is natively formatted for Lotus Notes, Oracle8 or SQL Server 7.0. When competitors launch a promotion, MarketStar can react immediately by suggesting a price discount on an HP product, said Cindy Yates, the director of marketing support for MarketStar.

"We were collecting tons of data for HP. Our feeling was, we ought to be able to use that info to play 'what if' games," said Jason Mark, a MarketStar product manager. "The only way to do that is to structure data so it could be queried by management-level people."

Like We're Entertainment, MarketStar analyzes market data using Knosys' ProClarity, one of the 300 applications Microsoft says now support SQL Server 7.0. Other OLAP front-end vendors that support SQL Server 7.0 include Brio Technology Inc., Business Objects Inc., Cognos Corp. and Seagate Enterprise Management Software Inc.

Uphill climb

But, despite successes like MarketStar, SQL Server 7.0's rise as a data warehousing platform won't be automatic. For one thing, Microsoft must struggle with being late to the data warehouse wars. Corporations that have already made platform commitments, such as Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Co., of Denver, often aren't interested in changing. Great-West's 2-year-old, Oracle8-based data warehouse offers speed and reliability, said Mark Locke, the company's technology officer. "If Oracle wasn't working, I'd have an ear to the ground. But since it is, why go there [to SQL Server 7.0]?"

Nor is Locke impressed by SQL Server 7.0's free OLAP services. "Microsoft is big on bundling things in, but so what? If you're at the enterprise level, you've probably already got OLAP," Locke said.

He also criticizes the lack of Bit-map indexing in SQL Server 7.0 (bit-map indexing is particularly helpful in speeding ad hoc queries important to data warehouse applications).

Barry Goffe, a SQL Server 7.0 product manager, concedes that the SQL Server 7.0 relational database engine doesn't support bit-map indexes. (Microsoft is contemplating adding this to future releases but has not made a decision yet.) But, Goffe said, the bit-map indexing available within the OLAP services engine does address ad hoc queries efficiency.

Others still question Windows NT's scalability and security, a hurdle that Microsoft may only overcome if the delayed Windows 2000 proves itself in the real world. "Until NT 5.0 [Windows 2000] is out and has proved itself, we're not considering NT a truly industrial-strength platform," Enterprise Group's Hackney said. "We're heading down the NT path for a couple sites with [databases of] a couple hundred gigabytes. Our position is, if we want to do something big and scalable, we'll do it on Unix when that's an option. But we're recommending that CIOs start doing skunkworks on SQL 7.0 just for survivability."

Concerns about the ability of Windows and the then-shipping SQL Server 6.5 to power multidimensional data analysis prompted Lesco Inc., a $418 million manufacturer and distributor of professional lawn care products, to build its data warehouse around DB2 and Essbase OLAP server from Hyperion Solutions Corp. (formerly Hyperion and Arbor Software). Lesco uses two front-end analysis tools from Cognos: PowerPlay, for multidimensional views of data, and Impromptu, for querying and report writing.

Now that Lesco has invested money and development and training resources in DB2, it's "not at all interested" in taking a fresh look at the latest version of SQL Server, said Wayne Murawski, vice president and CIO of the Rocky River, Ohio, company.

Microsoft officials contest the idea that the scalability of NT and SQL Server 7.0 and the products' lateness to the market pose major barriers. While Microsoft officials admit Windows 2000 will help the company market SQL Server 7.0 to larger enterprises, there are already some very large SQL Server 7.0-based warehouses. Andrew Hoover, Microsoft's group industry marketing manager, said there are production data warehouses built on SQL Server 7.0 supporting up to 2,000 concurrent users and 2 to 3 terabytes of data. That should be more than enough to convince midmarket companies that SQL Server 7.0 is scalable, said Microsoft's Goffe.

Hoover also believes that existing commitments to other platforms won't necessarily stall SQL Server 7.0 sales, since the RDBMS can integrate with other data sources. OLE DB for OLAP, for example, handles data from Oracle and Unix sources, while SNA Server provides a link to IBM host environments. Rather than choosing between SQL Server 7.0 and its competitors, Microsoft officials say IT managers can build hybrid systems: Unix versions of Oracle and DB2 underpinning multigigabyte data warehouses, while the low-cost Windows/SQL platform supports associated data marts.

In the meantime, Microsoft still has a few other SQL Server 7.0 shortcomings to clear up. We're Entertainment's Priestly, for example, said one of the first hurdles he faced was coping with the lack of a dynamic time dimension feature in SQL Server 7.0's OLAP set-up wizard, which is necessary to create the 354-day fiscal year accounting period We're Entertainment uses. "We had to physically create a fiscal calendar by building a table with all of the dates," Priestly said.

Data transformation

Others, such as consultant Hackney, point out that the bundled data transformation tools in SQL Server 7.0 are rudimentary, and while they work with data coming from a top competitor such as Oracle8, they don't support data from SAP AG. This forces IS managers to invest in high-end data transformation engines from vendors such as Informatica Corp., Platinum Technology Inc. and Sagent Technology Inc. Rather than compete with those products, Microsoft said it chose to provide basic transformation services that warehouse administrators could integrate with third-party products.

SQL Server 7.0 has also been criticized for relying on fat clients more than some of its competitors. IBM's DB2, for example, is designed so that complex calculations such as budgeted vs. actual capital spending are executed on the server. Users can then use a browser or lightweight desktop tool to view the results. SQL Server 7.0 tends to rely on the client or the middle-tier Transaction Server for such number crunching, say analysts and competitors. And that can increase the need for fat clients as well as network traffic.

Microsoft will have to fix those problems if it wants more companies such as We're Entertainment and MarketStar to buy into SQL Server as a platform for data warehousing. Don't bet against that happening, however, observers say. "It reflects a high level of naivete to assume Microsoft won't be a data warehouse contender," Hackney said. "The company doesn't have any place else to grow than with NT 5 [Windows 2000] and SQL 7."