Announcing the "Instant Data Warehouse" Product

Ladies and Gentlemen,

    Nolan Consultants is pleased to announce the first release of our product we have called the "Instant Data Warehouse".

The Problem:
The problem we see is the lack of entry level support for building the differing data models for the Data Warehouse. Especially the Star-Schema model for ROLAP. We see that many companies are not getting into star-schema or even data warehouse because of the complexity and difficulty in learning (or paying for) the initial set of code to build the star-schema. We also see a lot of companies trying to get into star-schema and having significant dificulty in doing so.

We see a LOT of questions on how to build a star-schema.

We are setting out to solve this problem. We are setting out to bring the use of ROLAP and star-schema into the economic reach of every organisation.

No longer will anyone, anywhere be able to say, we can't afford to build a star-schema ROLAP database. Every company can afford this.

The Product.
The product is a set of
-Cobol Code + DB22 SQL
-DB2/2 Tables
-Documentation
-20 hours Consulting time (either on site or remote (travel extra))

Which will give you a complete prototype of a Data Warehouse. You can study the code and the prototype and then extend it to your own use. Importantly, it imbeds nearly everything that you need to know, in code, to build an initial Data Warehouse.

The Benefit
There is a very long learning curve attached to learning to build a star schema database and have the code to maintain it. Your benefit will be the shortcut on the learning curve. This can be many, many months.

Some Features
1) Support for the three most popular Data Warehouse Data Models

• Time variance using from_date to_date dates and stability analysis (ala Bill Inmon) We support splitting entities into 3.
• Star Schema Support (ala Ralph Kimball)
• Third Normal Form Support (this is too simple to do much with) 2) 10 dimension tables 3) detail level fact tables, summary fact tables and time variant aggregated fact tables are all supported. 4) every dimension has up to 5 aggregation levels giving 6x6x6x6x6x6x6x6x6x6 levels of aggregation possible ie. around 60M levels of aggregation possible. 5) the detailed fact table carries 10 char, 10 integer and 10 dollar fields, and can be easily extended. 6) summary fact tables carry 10 integer and 10 dollar fields 7) time variant aggregated summary carries 20 integer and 20 dollar fields. 10 each for totals and changes. 8) aggregations are controlled by a table. To add a new aggregation level one simply adds another row to the table. These aggregations will then occur as more transactions are fed into the star schema. 9) it is possible to go back in time and create new levels of aggregations from past periods.
  1. easy to customise. Simply change the copybooks to indicate the data types of the columns.

The Investment
The initial investment to get a copy of this code and experience is set at $US10,000. So star-schema and OLAP really is in the reach of any company. The $US10,000 was set to be a similar cost of 1 workmonth of an analysts time (total cost) in the US. You would get all this code for the cost of one months effort. Everyone who does star schema will tell you that is a vrey attractive offer.

Incentive. Just in case you need some more. This is a first release. We have worked in software devlelopment to know that early on, we should listen hard to our customers. We will take orders from the first 10 customers (according to the timestamp on my mail), and then we will work with those customers to get them up and running. We will use all our star schema programmer resource to then enhance the product according to the requests of our first 10 customers. During this time we will not sell any more copies of the first release. It will be limited to 10. The second release will follow on a yet to be determined schedule. If you are about to build a star schema database I recommend you put your order in, fast.

What this is NOT.
This is not a competitor to PRISM,ETI,Carlton. The folks who built those products have built fine products that do 100 times more than we ever dream of doing. With this tool we are out to assist anyone who wants to get into building a Data Warehouse and does not have the budget for these tools. Importantly we are out to assist those folks who are going to build the whole Warehouse for under $500K US. (50% of all DWs according to Metagroup)   

More information.

You will find a very significant amount of detail at our home page on http://www.ozemail.com.au/~pnolan. We detail every table and every program. There are currenlty 25 tables and 30 programs, though we are testing a lot of diffeent things even as I type.

Thank you for your time in reading this append, I do appreciate it.

Yours Sincerely,  

Peter Nolan
Principal Consultant
Nolan Consultants Pty. Ltd.
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~pnolan Received on Wed Feb 07 1996 - 00:00:00 CET