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Technology Stocks : Red Brick Systems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Observer who wrote (148)	1/22/1998 1:19:00 PM
From: Thure Meyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 304

Observer, I hope that you are right about the rally. The circumstances surrounding the earnings report were irrational and dumb. Archer explained it succinctly. There are only two possible scenarios. a) Its all a mistake and RedBrick will really earn 17-20 cents this year b) RedBrick will lose 25-30 cents. I can understand that the PW analyst was irritated if scenario b) is correct since RedBrick did nothing to advertise this and it make the PW guy look like a fool. Thure

To: Observer who wrote (148)	1/23/1998 6:15:00 PM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 304

>>1) There are several instructive white papers on REDB's web site >>that nicely explain data warehousing and how REDB is different. If you look at the white paper dates, only one on data warehouse architecture is since Sep 96. Meanwhile, the leaders have each made major changes since then to really change the field. First, Sybase IQ with its unique vertical storage together with its bitmap storage/indexing can provide very fast responses on low cardinality data, especially when only a few fields need to be examined to determine the result set. Second, IFMX (and Oracle) have implemented multi-table join indices, which is the same as or equivalent to the star-schema of Red Brick. IFMX details this in a white paper about its DSS indices (which also include the bit-map indices) that are part of its XPS 8.2 release. Third, load and cleansing processes have been dramatically improved in the competitor DBMS's since those white papers were written. In particular, IFMX is capable of loading and deleting (including index adjustments) while other queries are running. This is part of the TPC/D multi-user benchmark, for example. In summary, a lot of the problems of Red Brick are because its competitors have caught up to it in the areas of its strengths, and have invaded its niche. Further, they have shown much greater ability to scale. For example, the MCI warehouse on IFMX is over 1T of raw data, and this has now been in production for about 2 years. This seems to be far beyond the capacity of Red Brick.