DBMS Client/Server Connection

April 1997

By Clara Parkes

AiN'T No Stopping Us Now

For a while it has been public knowledge that Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.) is trying to conquer the Unix market with its Windows NT operating system. In the first 30 days of its release, NT 4.0 sold more than 150,000 units, while Microsoft claims that sales in other server markets were flat. It may be too soon still to see who will truly win the race, but many traditionally Unix-based database software vendors are playing it safe by expanding their offerings to support Windows NT.

One such company is Informix Software Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.), which recently announced a new product suite aimed primarily at large organizations that are implementing data warehouses on Windows NT. Called FastStart, the toolset will include Informix MetaCube 3.0 ROLAP server as well as a choice of Informix OnLine Workgroup Server or OnLine Dynamic Server databases. Until 1996, Informix was strictly a Unix vendor. IBM Corp., Sybase Inc., Oracle Corp., and other RDBMS vendors also market Windows NT versions of their database servers.

If Windows NT is to succeed in its takeover of the corporate marketplace, one area in which improvements will be critical is support for mobile workforces -- an issue that wasn't important just a few years ago. Currently, to run Windows NT successfully on a notebook computer, you must use proprietary extensions and drivers provided by most of the major notebook vendors. Microsoft claims that it will not provide any improvements until the NT5 upgrade in mid-1998.

Esperant Returns

Since DBMS reviewed Speedware Corp. Inc.'s (Toronto) Autobahn Web application development and deployment product in July 1996, I hadn't heard any news about the company. As it turns out, Speedware entered the business intelligence market in October 1996 with the acquisition of Software AG's Esperant end-user query and reporting tool. Recently the company divided itself into two main business units: a development technologies unit (focusing on Autobahn, Visual Speedware, and Internet applications) and a business intelligence division.

Speedware also just announced Esperant 4.0, which has been significantly remodeled to include integrated ROLAP and data visualization functionality. Version 4.0 is fully coded in Visual C++ with Microsoft Foundation Classes; the 32-bit version missed the 4.0 boat and will ship with version 4.1 in July.

The Query Assistant has been completely redesigned and now offers "intelligent editing" capabilities. A new Reporter uses a live data paradigm; a Merge Wizard lets you combine results from multiple queries; enterprise support has been improved, the security system has been rewritten, and the product now supports OLE2 Automation for integration within user-written applications.

Speedware also announced a new desktop edition of its Media EIS/OLAP product, Media/PE, which will be sold in conjunction with Esperant 4.0. The two products are being tightly integrated to allow Esperant query results to be instantly transferred into Media/PE's multidimensional database for analysis by the desktop user.

Cognos Demonstrates 4Sight

Another desktop-related announcement comes from Cognos Corp. (Burlington, Mass.), which signed a definitive agreement to acquire London startup Right Information Systems Limited (RIS) and its 4Thought desktop data mining (DDM) product for approximately $8 million. Although desktop data mining technology alone hasn't proven to be a cash cow, Cognos' strategy of integrating 4Thought technology with its business intelligence products may prove to be just what the DDM market needs. Much as data marts provide less-expensive alternatives to the somewhat daunting data warehouse, desktop data mining tools give users most of the power of data mining with less of a financial risk.

Faster, Better, Better. . .

Tandem Computers Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) recently announced a new approach to data mining with the company's Object Relational Data Mining Technology (yes, Tandem holds a trademark on "Object Relational Data Mining"). Along with this news, Tandem also announced several Object Relational Data Mining solutions through third-party vendors.

The proposed Object Relational Data Mining Technology architecture establishes a standard SQL interface between client data mining tools and both object-relational and relational database engines. The complete warehouse data set is available for realtime data mining. The database engine will perform specialized data manipulation functions required by the data mining algorithms. Because the architecture exploits the capabilities of object-relational database engines, you can mine larger volumes of data at higher speeds.

Tandem will promote the establishment of de facto standards for these extensions with other database vendors and data mining tool providers. Tandem's Object Relational Data Mining solutions will be generally available starting in Q3 1997, and they will support databases that reside on Windows NT Server-based platforms or Tandem's own NonStop Himalaya servers.

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Updated Tuesday, March 18, 1997