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To: SemiBull who wrote (11015)	6/2/1998 11:27:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Respond to of 14631

"Startups on the Red Herring radar" What do people know about Informix, Intel, Sun, Sony, Comcast and US West partnering with Intertainer? July Red Herring mentions that Intertainer "aims to be the first broadband content-on-demand network, offering movies, television programming, and music to PCs over the Internet. (Televisions are next.)" "Commercial trials are scheduled to begin in Philadelphia and Denver by this fall." Sounds like a good job for IFMX. Any thoughts? The same issue talks about MicroStrategy and their "decision-support" software. CEO Michael Saylor says "if we get even 1 percent of the (database and decision-support) market, we can be a $10 billion company." Any more thoughts out there?

To: SemiBull who wrote (11015)	6/3/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

>>''Comparing feature to feature, performance to performance . . . Red >>Brick will win, hands down,'' Craig said. ''Oracle can't touch >>them.'' Red Brick is a "one-trick" pony. That means that it can only do one thing well--data warehousing--and is incapable of competing in the broader DBMS market (OLTP, objects, ....). Even worse, they only compete well in one type of data warehouse, and do not do well in other categories. For Red Brick, they assume that the primary data will be in one table, and that all the other tables will generally be related to the primary table. They further assume that there will be lots of multi-table joins with conditions on multiple of the tables (i.e., subsets of multiple tables). They optimize this by creating "StarIndex" for these joins--an index that spans multiple tables, so that the selection conditions can work primarily in the index, instead of walking all the records of multiple tables. This is how they get their performance. The problem is that their advantage is coming to an end. Informix has "multi-table join indexes" in XPS 8.2 (not yet shipping, but stable enough to show and benchmark). I believe that Oracle also has something like that in Oracle8, but maybe not quite as well done or flexible. The reason that Red Brick had an advantage was that until recently, the data warehousing was such a small segment of the DBMS market, and these special index types did not have much use in OLTP market, which was the bulk of the warehouse. Now that hardware has improved to really be able to support data warehousing (lots of parallel machines and the price is dropping dramatically), the data warehouse market is large enough for the big boys to really be interested, and worth the R&D to bring the new features to market. Further, some of the competitors seem to be further along in some other features important to data warehousing. For example, "bit map indexes" are also very useful and can enhance performance. Sybase IQ has been shipping for sometime and looks very good where this makes a difference. Informix (in 8.2) and Oracle are both adding bit-map index capabilities (although not to the extent of Sybase IQ). As far as I can tell, Red Brick seems to have bit-map index capabilities, but only recently added, and definitely not as developed as Sybase. mark

To: SemiBull who wrote (11015)	6/3/1998 1:11:00 PM
From: Dave Yenne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

Red Brick is a small fish in a very big pond when it comes to data warehousing. As you and the article states, Red Brick was the first to design a database specifically for data warehousing. That was back in 1993-94 and not now. REDB has done no major little technology advancements since then. The analyst from Hurwitz, Mr. Craig, is very misinformed as to what the other vendors offer for data warehousing solutions. REDB's DecisionScape isn't the first of its kind. In fact Sybase announced their Warehouse Studio over a month ago. REDB is treding water to stay a float. The fact that they have 300 customers in 4-5 years of business isn't very impressive. The thing I will agree with Mr. Craig on is that this move is REDB's last shot to survive. The RDBMS market is consolidating and companies are looking to invest in technologies that span the whole spectrum of their business. REDB doesn't provide middleware or data transformation capabilities to facilitate population and data currency for the data warehouse. REDB is also very costly to buy, operate and administer. MSFT will be comming out with their Plato OLAP tool next year. I'm sure Plato will be bundled with SQL Server. This event more than anything else IMO is what will hurt REDB the most. REDB will not be able to compete at the price point of the MSFT solution. IBM, ORCL, IFMX, and SYBS will be able to leverage their existing OLTP customer base against the MSFT data warehouse offering.