Descisys software rips into databases

By RICHARD WOOD

Business intelligence firm Descisys has unveiled software for speeding up querying and reporting of information held in data warehouses - the databases extracted from a company's transaction information into a form that more readily allows analysis.

Auckland-based Descisys has patents pending on its TeraSolve technology, which performs queries on IBM DB2-based data warehouses at a speed claimed to be 10 to 30 times faster than usual methods.

Managing director Vilosh Brito said companies around the world had been striving for more than five years to find an easier and faster way to interrogate data. He said Descisys' patent applications included an input/output system for relational databases, a compression system, and an indexing system.

The underlying problem is that the efficient relational table format used by most enterprises for data warehouses is unintelligible to the business user, who just wants to see the data according to everyday business views.

Regular querying of that data is not fast enough and expanding out the tables into a more accessible form rapidly expands the databases.

TeraSolve keeps the database size down and has a more efficient way of performing the queries. The first front-end software supported was Brio but that will be extended to Cognos and Business Objects. The first relational database supported was IBM DB2, to be followed by Oracle.

Descisys is well positioned to present its technology internationally, after moving into the top rung of IBM partners in April. IBM also took a 5 per cent stake in the firm at that time and has a target-based option for another 7 per cent.

At the IBM Solutions shows last week, Descisys used a 2.4GHz notebook computer with 1GB of memory acting on 1.3GB, or about 55 million transactions, of input data held in an IBM DB2 database.

Without any pre-aggregations or calculations, retrieving uncalculated data took between 0.1 and 0.4 of a second. High-level aggregations took between 12 seconds and 18 seconds.