TDWI A Decade of Excellence: Education, Research and Community

In Search of...DW Appliance Profitability

To listen to some critics tell it, data warehousing appliance vendors have enjoyed a prolonged honeymoon. Because so many DW appliance specialists are privately held companies, skeptics allege, they don't have to publicly disclose their financial information. Call it FUD, if you will, but DW appliance pioneer Netezza last week helped shine a light on the
still-murky financials of the DW appliance segment when it announced its intention to go public. To a degree, Netezza's initial filing helps validate some of these criticisms; at the same time, however, it seems likely that the DW appliance segment has turned a corner, too. [more]

IBM Encourages Customers to Bring BI Back
Home—to the Mainframe

IBM is pursuing a number of pricing stratagems to reverse the exodus of mainframe data and mainframe workloads, and, more ambitiously, to recast its System z mainframe as an affordable and highly scalable platform for business intelligence processing. One such stratagem is Big Blue's zIIP processor engine, basically a software license that lets customers host BI or DW workloads on mainframe hardware at a substantially reduced cost. With so many customers, particularly in the government and public sector industries, hosting terabytes of mission-critical information in mainframe data stores, there's an undeniable logic to Big Blue's move. The question is: will it pan out? [more]

TDWI Radio News: Big Blue Touts Dynamic, Balanced Warehousing

With Netezza announcing its intention to go public, and IBM rolling out its Balanced Warehouse offering, the evolution of data warehouse appliances appears to be moving toward maturation. In this TDWI Radio News interview, we spoke to Karen Parrish, vice president of business intelligence solutions for IBM. Tune in to hear details about how IBM views the appliance market, and what dynamic warehousing is all about. [more]

TDWI Keynote Preview: Unstructured Data and Search

In the structured world of data warehousing, information falls neatly into place. But what about unstructured data? Prevailing estimates place the percentage of structured enterprise data at just 20 percent (perhaps owing to the classic 80/20 rule). Increasingly, users, analysts, consultants and (of course), vendors, are focusing on that lion's share of information. At TDWI's World Conference in Boston next month, Senior Manager of TDWI Research, Philip Russom, will reveal the findings of his new report on this subject. Click here for more information, or click here to see the full conference lineup.

TDWI Webinar: Search-Enabled Business Intelligence

One of the greatest assets of the Internet age is the power of pull: unlike life in the Old Ages before the World Wide Web, surfers can now pull data from myriad sources in virtually no time at all. This rule applies not just to movie listings and auction items, but enterprise data as well. Due to the increasing attention paid to enterprise search and unstructured data, TDWI commissioned a research report and corresponding Webinar on the topic, conducted by our own Senior Manager of TDWI Research, Philp Russom.

Click here to register for the Webinar.

White Paper: Semantics, Metadata and Identifying Master Data

Effective management of master data (MDM) can yield remarkable benefits for achieving that coveted single version of the truth, but identifying master data entities can pose a genuine challenge. This white paper offers some insights for locating and understanding the relationships between data elements. [more]

Analyzer 2005 by Strategy Companion Corp. is a BI front-end for SQL Server that provides dynamic reports, ad hoc queries, and OLAP with a zero-footprint client.