Sand Technology Systems: Nucleus Set To Revolutionise Data Analysis
Sand Technology Systems International Inc., has launched Nucleus, an award winning set of data warehousing tools which promises to revolutionise data warehousing for the telecommunications community.
"At present there is nothing between shrink wrapped database products, such as Microsoft Access, and bespoke data warehouse solutions costing millions of pounds," said Duncan Painter, the general manager of Sand Technology Systems Europe. "Nucleus is what the telecoms community has been waiting for. Not only is it highly cost effective, it enables the creation and recreation of data marts in days as opposed to years, and has more analytical power than most top- end solutions."
Nucleus comprises two tools. Nucleus Exploration Warehouse is a prototyping and development facility for data warehouse designers that allows fast and simple data acquisition, assimilation, and validation. It allows warehouse development to be completed within days, instead of the typical months or even years, and requires up to 70 per cent less manpower to complete a typical implementation. Further, using the Nucleus Exploration Warehouse, end users have access to the data throughout the process to allow required business questions to be structured from day one.
Nucleus Exploration Mart, is a powerful analytical processing tool for end users of existing data marts and warehouses. This product addresses the need to perform iterative, ad hoc, forensic queries of data, involving drill down often not envisioned during the original design of the data warehouse/mart. The patented data storage techniques of Nucleus allow any question to be asked and answered in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.
"The telecommunications industry is a leader in decision support systems/data warehousing", continued Painter. "This is largely because the industry has easy access to large volumes of complete, concise, and accurate call detail records. Both telecommunications companies and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) could benefit greatly from Nucleus's decision support systems as it would allow the to answer questions such as: "How many households have product/service X?' or "How many new orders were for multiple products?
"Nucleus can also be used for network planning applications as these are also driven by data warehousing. In this instance, call detail records allow telecoms companies and ISPs to measure the utilisation and growth of individual network components."
One of the key differences between Nucleus and standard databases is its radical Token database technology, which, put simply, drastically reduces the amount of data that has to be stored by stripping out replicated information and replacing it with tokens. For example, "W" might be replaced with a token of 01 wherever it appeared, "John" might be 02, and "Smith" 03.
Because this technology significantly reduces data storage volumes, queries can be executed very quickly, as there is less information to process. This reduced analysis load also means that the hardware needed to carry out even the most complex queries can be considerably less powerful, and therefore less expensive, than that required to run most of the data warehouses currently operating.
Nucleus has already picked up a succession of prestigious awards in North America and was voted the 1998 World Class Solution, Database Engine of the Year for data warehousing and data mart by DM Review, North America's leading business intelligence and data warehousing magazine.
Nucleus is available for both 64-bit Unix and 32-bit Windows NT and 95/98 platforms.
Sand Technology Systems International Inc. provides high performance, scaleable software solutions for data mining, data marts, data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP).