Johannesburg, 20 Aug 1998
Red Brick Systems has announced the availability of Red Brick Formation 1.3, the newest addition to Red Brick DecisionScape designed to provide dynamic and scalable data extraction, transformation and movement capabilities in data warehousing and analytic application environments.
Red Brick Formation enables analytic application designers and information technologists to create, manage and evolve complex data integration routines.
These features enable companies to adapt information flow to match changing business processes and decision-makers` needs.
Red Brick Formation is designed to load and transform production-scale data sets among data warehouses and data marts of any size running on Windows NT or Unix.
Red Brick products are represented in South Africa by Software Futures, a member of Computer Configurations Holdings.
The combination of Red Brick Formation with Red Brick Warehouse provides a superior base for building and deploying decision support projects and analytic applications. These products are integrated in the Red Brick DecisionScape environment of products, services, methodology and partnerships for successful decision support solutions.
"A highly volatile and critical point in the evolution of a decision support project is when data is gathered, cleansed, transformed and moved among target data warehouses or data marts," says Aubrey van Aswegen, Data Futures GM at Software Futures. "Red Brick has recognised that an extraction and transformation tool with the power and performance of Red Brick Formation would help customers speed initial data warehouse deployment. But even more valuable is Red Brick Formation`s ability to simply and flexibly manage evolving data and its structure whenever business changes - in other words, all the time."
Sapphire Software lauds Red Brick Formation
Sapphire Software develops and markets a number of software products and consulting services for the semiconductor industry, networking industry and SAP customers. Sapphire Software evaluated Red Brick Formation as a tool to extract and transform SAP data and load it into Red Brick data warehouses for high-performance analysis
"We are very impressed with Red Brick Formation`s intuitiveness and openness as we create solutions to enable analysis for SAP customers," says Sriram Ramani, president of Sapphire Software. "One of the key requirements we had in selecting a data extraction and transformation tool was its ability to take advantage of custom code we had already created. Red Brick Formation`s operators have built-in functionality to do this for us. As well, Formation is easy to use and has a seamless integration with Red Brick Warehouse`s loader, which makes the transformation process quick and reliable. It also enables us to help our customers quickly take advantage of their growing business information."
Red Brick Formation features
Red Brick Formation reduces the time and difficulty inherent in building and maintaining very large data warehouses and analytic data stores. Red Brick Formation provides a visual environment for developing and reusing complex, multi-source, multi-target transformation routines. Red Brick Formation processes data in a single pass using intelligent parallelisation for maximum throughput. Its built-in transformation operators eliminate the need to write custom code.
Red Brick Formation consists of a single, integrated, client-server application, which includes Red Brick Formation Architect(TM) and Red Brick Formation Flow Engine.
Red Brick Formation Architect: a visual tool to design, evolve and generate data integration jobs.
Red Brick Formation Architect, using a Windows interface, enables designers to define end-to-end, complex data integration processes by drawing data flow diagrams that capture business rules. Data definitions may be custom or imported from industry-standard sources. Designers may choose from more than 200 pre-defined transformation and logic functions such as "duplicate deletion" and "householding". Designers may also develop custom transformations or call out to third-party programs for specialised tasks. Built-in and custom operators may be combined to solve the most challenging data preparation problems among multiple sources and multiple targets.
Once a data integration job has been defined, the designer specifies the run-time environment and allocates resources. The data integration job may then be deployed to any Windows NT or Unix computer running a Red Brick Formation Flow Engine.
Red Brick Formation Flow Engine: executes the data integration jobs.
Red Brick Formation Flow Engine is a server-based component that executes the data integration jobs created using Red Brick Formation Architect. It combines the pre-built operators with custom logic and manages job execution. The Red Brick Formation Flow Engine handles large data volumes using a "one-pass" architecture that automatically takes advantage of parallelism in multiprocessor machines.
Red Brick Formation 1.3 is available for orders.
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