DM Review, July issue looks a bit better for Sand than the first article did. This has some hard facts about what the product does.
Also we had a bit of interest today, new buying? any thoughts from u guys?
The following article is part of the July DMReview product reveiw. You can
see the entire issue at dmreview.com
PRODUCT REVIEW: Nucleus Dramatically Improves Query-Response Time for CN
MANUFACTURER:
Hitachi Data Systems
750 Central Expressway
Santa Clara, CA 95056
(408) 970-1000, (408) 727-8036 fax
www.hds.com
PLATFORMS: The Nucleus system is implemented on an HDS 5780 Intelligent
Storage Subsystem, incorporating a 64-bit RISC processor/controller and
Hitachi RAID 5 storage subsystems.
BACKGROUND: Canadian National Railway (CN) is Canada's largest railroad
system, and the sixth largest in North America with revenues of $4.4
billion (Canadian) in 1997. It operates 14,500 route miles of track
across Canada and 750 miles in the United States. The company has about
22,800 employees.
PROBLEM SOLVED: CN was in the process of building a data warehouse, but
could not resolve data structure complexities fast enough to meet the
management information needs of a newly restructured company with a
strong customer-service focus. CN encountered many problems related to
validating new business rules and consolidating data from different
sources. The only way to resolve these problems--and the only way to
respond to ongoing management information needs--was to write programs
to extract and validate data from new and legacy systems. It was a slow,
resource-consuming process. Nucleus helped CN bridge the information
gap. It allowed for instantaneous answers to marketing queries before
the data warehouse was ready. It saved hours of manual coding that
otherwise would have been needed to extract and analyze data from new
and legacy systems. And it accelerated the process of modeling data for
the warehouse.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: CN uses Nucleus to validate and understand the
content of various systems and to test relationships between systems,
which has helped accelerate the data modeling process for their
warehouse. Nucleus is also used for data exploration--one-off queries
that will never end up in the managed query environment of the data
warehouse. An example could be responding to special information
requests from government or regulators--such as, how much rail traffic
has CN run throughout the province of Ontario this year? Nucleus is also
used to build and drive their new intranet application that gives
management easy access to information about who in the company is
generating revenue and how.
STRENGTHS: The product's principal strengths are the ease with which it
lets you load and query data from disparate systems. CN's data
originates from our DB2 warehouse, legacy IDMS systems and other non-MVS
sources. This data can be loaded onto Nucleus without any extensive data
modeling and is immediately ready for data queries. The other major
strength is the speed with which Nucleus can provide answers to queries
regardless of which fields are being queried.
WEAKNESSES: Nucleus had two minor weaknesses, both of which have been
addressed by Hitachi Data Systems. The documentation needed more detail.
HDS recently launched a Web site that resolves this by providing more
in-depth information. The other is that Nucleus was not yet SQL
92-compliant, which meant that, in some infrequent instances, CN needed
to write two or three queries when one might have been sufficient. (It
should be noted that the multiple queries still complete in a small
fraction of the overall time required with SQL 92-compliant approaches.)
SQL 92 functionality will be provided in the next release of Nucleus.
DELIVERABLES: HDS claimed that Nucleus would allow for easy loading of
data from disparate systems as flat files and then use SQL queries to
get the answers CN needed--in seconds. The test Nucleus system came up
with the same answers CN had already validated using alternate
technologies--and it typically produced them in about 10 seconds
compared to many hours!
VENDOR SUPPORT: Hitachi Data Systems is very responsive and provides
excellent support, scrupulously honoring the four-hour call-support
contract.
DOCUMENTATION: The documentation needed more detail. HDS recently
launched a Web site that resolves this by providing more in-depth
information.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewed by Andre De Rico, director of marketing, Information Systems &
Processes for Canadian National Railway. |
