Are You Weary of Warehouses?

Sometimes a data warehouse takes too much -- too much time to implement and too much money. Some organizations just want to leave the data in legacy databases and run straightforward queries against it.

The Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency (MHFA) was in just this type of pickle. The Boston-based affordable housing agency had at least 13 databases filled with information about who owns property, subsidy and payment histories, grant allocations and property descriptions. But it didn't have a way to easily look into all of the databases at the same time to run reports or perform thorough queries.

"We looked into the possibility of building a data warehouse, but to try to do that along with our Y2K [fixes] was just too much," said Carl Richardson, a project leader and senior program analyst at MHFA.

Richardson instead chose DQpowersuite from Charlotte, N.C.-based Metagon Technologies LLC and rolled it out in three months to give 35 senior managers Web-based database access capabilities.

DQpowersuite includes DQbroker, which understands the overall database system architecture, and DQtransform, a piece that automates the extraction, transformation and loading of data from any source to any target. When a query comes in that requires access to multiple databases, the broker distributes the components of that query as close to each database as possible, which lets each database retain control of its own data.

The MHFA has installed DQpowersuite on its intranet as a type of back-end database search engine that works with Cognos Corp.'s PowerPlay Web and Impromptu Web Reports to perform searches and deliver reports.

"Unlike a full data warehouse, we can make associations outside of the database and don't have to do as complete a data cleansing as we would have otherwise," Richardson said.

"Prior to using the Metagon tool, we had difficulty accessing different databases simultaneously," said Gail Bishop, project manager at MHFA. "Now we're able to look at data from different databases and put it together in the same report, which we couldn't do before."

Good if Simple

Analysts said avoiding a data warehouse by using distributed queries can be useful for relatively simple or routine queries.

Some data doesn't necessarily require a full data warehouse for analysis, and users are turning to tools from Metagon, Inforay Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and Enterworks Inc. in Ashburn, Va., for cross-enterprise data views, said Bob Moran, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston.

It has suited the MHFA well, Richardson said. With DQpowersuite, the agency has been able to slash the time it takes to run a cross-database analysis of a management company from two days to "about 15 minutes," Richardson said. And users are clamoring for it. The first finished phase of the rollout was scheduled for June, then pushed up to March. Now Richardson said he expects to open access to all 300 users by September.

Richard Finkelstein, president of Performance Computing Inc., a Chicago consultancy, said such cross-database querying is useful for simple or predefined queries but doesn't offer the full range of query capabilities available from a data warehousing.

"Such connectivity is sometimes based on simplifying the database language, which can cause limited database functionality and performance," he said.