SAS/Warehouse Administrator 2.0 Delivers Continuous Change Capability To Data Warehousing

SAS Institute Inc., has announced the beta availability of SAS/Warehouse Administrator, Version 2.0.

The announcement of improved IT productivity through the ability to manage continuous change was made at the Gartner IT Expo in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., where SAS software is being demonstrated in Booth no. 206. The enhancements in Version 2.0 provide proactive publish/subscribe capability, online analytical processing (OLAP) support, a GUI interface for entering metadata, integration with SAS Enterprise Miner and Enterprise Reporter analysis and reporting tools, and a job-centric process editor to manage large data warehouse environments.

According to Frank Nauta, SAS Institute product manager for data warehouse solutions, "Successful warehouses are continuously changing to keep pace with the changing business rules that they support. Data is added, structures are changed, business processes become more complex and more users require support."

In an effort to help IT professionals meet the demands of administering a warehouse, SAS Institute has introduced a number of enhancements to SAS/Warehouse Administrator software, aligning the software more closely to the way warehouse processes are structured. "In today's large and ever-growing data warehouse environments," Nauta added, "our goal is to provide proactive information delivery through integration with products like MetaSpace Explorer, and to help make IT professionals more productive by being able to easily manage continuous change."

In large data warehouse/data mart environments, multi-dimensional databases (MDDBs) and OLAP (ROLAP, MOLAP, and HOLAP) are an integral part of nearly every warehousing initiative. They are used to pull frequently accessed summaries out of the greater detail in the enterprise warehouse, and to create subsets for further exploration. The growing number and complexity of these structures that a business needs to operate can create a very challenging technical environment to manage. Version 2.0 automates the generation and management of MDDBs through process rules captured in the metadata by:

• Increased warehouse administration efficiency via object cut/paste ability to/from the data warehouse.
• Enhanced automation support and scheduled event control through a metadata GUI interface.
• Creation of re-usable custom transformations and expressions.
• Direct feeds from any relational database and easier-to-view metadata give warehouse administrators instantaneous identification of data origin, and faster import/export of data from third-party packages.
• Repeatable, metadata-driven (no code required) transformation add-ins.
• Integration with analysis and reporting tools such as Enterprise Miner and Enterprise Reporter.

Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: http://www.sas.com/.