Anyone out there used Alterian? If so what are the key benefits compared to
B.Objects and Cognos?

"John Halpin" <john_halpin (AT) blueyonder (DOT) co.uk> wrote

Alterian doesn't compete with OLAP tools like PowerPlay, etc. The only BO
product that sort-of competes with Alterian is Set Analyzer.

I describe Alterian as one of a group of column-oriented processing products
that does high-speeed filtering and set analysis of detailed data, which is
the opposite to OLAP. With COP products, you analyse then aggregate, whereas
with OLAP, you analyse aggregates and occasionally drill to detail. Both are
useful, but you don't use them for the same apps and there's no point
comparing products from one group with the other.

Question for you.

Alterian uses the CBAT database methodology.

Does Alterian own this methodology or can you actually purchase a database
with this ability?

Ian


"Nigel Pendse" <nigelp.nospam (AT) compuserve (DOT) com> wrote

CBAT is Alterian's name for I what prefer to call Column-Oriented
Technology, or COP. It's not a methodology but a type of optimised
database. Alterian's implementation is proprietary and unique, but there are
a number of other COP products available that do a similar job. So, to
answer you question, you can buy other databases based on similar
principles, but they won't describe themselves as CBAT as that's Alterian's
own name.

You can think of COP as being a category of high-performance products that
are used for the analysis of large volumes of transaction information, in
the same way as MOLAP is used for the analysis of multidimensional data.
Both categories use special, highly-optimised databases that, for the
particular apps for which they are intended, are far faster and more
functional than general-purpose alternatives such as relational databases.
But this doesn't man that COP and MOLAP are rhe same thing.


"IanS" <ian (AT) blade (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote

Thanks Nigel. Your reply has cleared a few things up for me.

Can you list a few suppliers of COP databases please. Search engines are
struggling with the Column-Oriented
Technology description.

thanks

Ian

"Nigel Pendse" <nigelp.nospam (AT) compuserve (DOT) com> wrote

I'm not really an expert on COP databases, and it doesn't help they don't
use consistent terminology, but I think that Aleri, Sand, smartFOCUS, Sybase
IQ, Synera, etc probably come into the category. But that doesn't mean that
any are exactly the same as Alterian, as each approaches the problem in a
different way.


"IanS" <ian (AT) blade (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote

Hello John,

you can definitely get this technology from Sybase (IQ) and SAND (Analytic
Server). Both use quite similar techniques as descriped by Steve Tolkin in
the "Taxir" thread. To keep the story simple both vendors use algorithms
that highly compress the source data and only keep one occurance of every
attribute stored. This means that you will find in a per se "normalized"
attribute only one occurance of "John" and in another only one occurance of
the value field "12.5" (USD). This contributes a lot to a good ratio between
source data and data base size. The databases make intensive use of
pointers to this occurances. Both also use index techniques. SAND uses
implicit indexes, Sybase IQ additionally allows administrators to define
several indexes. Due to this form of data storage you have implicit
partitioning and both vendors calculate fields which store data like the
number of total rows or distinct occurances as metadata to each column. Both
tools are especially suitable for analytic analysis as being done for aCRM
or aSCM and offer very good response times i. e. for dynamically involved
filtes. Also both vendors provide a normal OLE DB or ODBC interface to query
the data base using SQL. Whilst SAND Analytic Server can be reduced to a
"high performance" analytic platform, Sybase offers a much broader range of
products especially for database and data model design, Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI not ETL) and supports decentralized data
storage (Hub and Spoke architectures) quite well.

Kind regards,

Joerg

I don't know the other tools mentioned by Nigel. But you might most probably
also find similar techniques in this other tools.

J.

"Joerg Narr" <n_o_s_p_a_m_joerg_narr (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:bpi2ah$1nfeij$1 (AT) ID-25239 (DOT) news.uni-berlin.de...

For anyone who is interested, I have added a short entry for COP in The OLAP
Report glossary: http://www.olapreport.com/glossary.htm

This is clearly an area with quite a few products and a surprisingly long
history (even longer than OLAP), but it seems relatively little known or
understood.

"Joerg Narr" <n_o_s_p_a_m_joerg_narr (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote