| Organizations everywhere
are empowering their employees with information. But the data
that is required to make effective decisions is often inaccessible,
locked in operational systems or external databases. In order
to use this data for analysis and decision making, the data
must be extracted from the operational OLTP applications and
transferred to a desktop user who must have query tools to
analyze the data and solve unique problems.
In addition to the extraction problem, the IT professional
is facing an ever increasing data reservoir, due to proliferation
of computer technology throughout every industry, lowered
cost and footprint of mass storage and increasing demand for
organized information as computer users grow more and more
comfortable with computer technology.
Knowledge workers in an organization are demanding complex
information from different departments. Dealing with enormous
amount of data requires the creation and management of a
Data Warehouse.
COLD Data Warehouse Manager is a specialized
database, modeled for use by decision support and other
business analysis software products. Data warehousing consists
of a combination of multiple steps that allows collection,
cleansing, organizing and evaluation of data. Most data
warehouses are implemented with dimensional data models.
Dimensional data models categorize the data in a multi-dimension
matrix.
IMAGE-X's COLD Miner allows
creation of a data warehouse using computer output data, thus
eliminating the complex and costly data warehouse methodology
that is typically being advocated at present. Data can be
extracted without the need for clean-up if the data is already
formatted by the current application to generate a print output.
The print output can be considered as clean data for any warehousing
purposes. The computer output data can not be imported in
a data warehouse database easily, since the data is not formatted.
Storage of the computer output data takes less space and can
be accomplished on any storage medium including the low cost
optical storage.
The major advantage is that creating computer output is a
routine process for any organization. Secondly the output
can be generated by an array of systems using different database
engines. The addition of any new report does not require additional
programming efforts. A number of organizations are already
creating these reports for storage on microfilm or optical
media.
Once the data is formatted in this fashion, then a slice
of data can be isolated rather easily by down loading the
data from the computer output repository to COLD Miner,
a decision support system tool. IMAGE-X's COLD Miner
also allows exporting of the data from COLD Miner to desktop
tools such as spreadsheet programs that can be used to format
the data for a graphical representation.
COLD Data Warehouse Manager gives corporations the competitive
advantage of a data warehouse without the high cost required
for traditional solutions. |
By
Business Need
