WhereScape RED Builds data warehouses, fast.

The BBBT is one of those events you wait a long time for.  The brain child of Claudia Imhoff, the Boulder BI Brain Trust is an opportunity for vendors to spend quality time with some of the BI industry’s leading analysts.  It is a popular and sort after event - I understand the slots for 2010 are basically gone already.  Our slot was booked in the beginning of the year, and we got to present on the 20th of November.

We have met with and briefed a number of the analysts before, but this is a little different.  First off it is face-to-face in Claudia’s office.  Secondly it is for half a day - much longer than a standard briefing.

Talking with a room of highly intelligence and opinionated analysts has its challenges.  At one point a tweet came through that it was like being in a room full of ADD sufferers - and that was from some one sitting there.  As well as the physical audience, analysts also dial in from around the US and the world.  I hate to think what it is like to try and keep up with all the questions and conversations if you are not actually present.

The BBBT is held in Boulder, Colorado.  I had not been to Boulder before, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed visiting.  The Boulderado was a great hotel, and the restaurants and ambiance of the city was superb.

I may admit to sneaking in some geocaching the day before -always good to add a new state.  Dinner the night before with Claudia and the crew from B-eye-network was a highlight, and there may be some truth to the rumor it finished at a Tequila bar.

The actual presentation is pretty free format.  For the first half we choose to talk about WhereScape and WhereScape RED - why we started the company, what we wnated to achieve, who was buying our software, and what they were achieving with it.  All the way through there are tweets coming from around the world and in the room - sort of instant and constant polling of how interesting you are. 

For the second half we choose to talk about our future directions.  For us this was the interesting part.  We talked through our ideas of the market and the new things you will be seeing from WhereScape over the next year or so.  We are excited about our roadmap, and it was invaluable to get feedback and insights at an early stage from a bunch of savvy experienced people.

Overall the experience was great.  We got heaps of feedback and ideas, and I hope the analyst community gained a greater understanding of what customers can achieve with WhereScape.  Thanks to Claudia and Dave Imhoff for hosting the event, Shawn Rogers and Richard Hackathorn for their instant-blogs (both were up before the end of the session) and all the participants for their interest and comments.

Installing RED on a Windows 64-bit server, with Oracle as a repository or source system

When installing RED on 64-bit Windows, the installer selects the following installation folder by default:

C:\Program Files (x86)\WhereScape\

This is where 32-bit applications normally reside on a 64-bit Windows platform.

However, if Oracle is involved, either as the data warehouse repository, or as a source system, installing RED in “Program Files (x86)” causes a problem.

The problem is that Oracle doesn’t like directories that have a parenthesis in the name - applications using Oracle cannot be located in a directory with parenthesis in the name, and this includes RED using an ODBC connection to Oracle.  The result…RED will not be able to connect to Oracle.

This issue can be prevented by changing the installation directory of RED to:

C:\WhereScape

For more information about this Oracle issue, see

http://tiredblogger.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/oracle-data-access-components-odac-with-64-bit-development/

64-bit SQL Server data warehouse repository with Oracle as a source system

If you are running a 64-bit SQL Server data warehouse, and need to connect to one or more Oracle source systems, you will require both the 32-bit and 64-bit Oracle Clients installed on the 64-bit Windows Server:

1) 32-bit Oracle Client

The RED client is a 32-bit application, and requires a 32-bit ODBC source to connect to an Oracle database. 

The 32-bit Oracle Client is required so you can set up a 32-bit ODBC source using the “Microsoft ODBC for Oracle” ODBC source.

2) 64-bit Oracle Client

For better data load performance, create a SQL Server “Linked Server” to connect to an Oracle source system.

The RED scheduler will use the Linked Server for the data loads.

64-bit SQL Server requires the 64-bit Oracle Client and ODAC (Oracle Data Access Components) to create the Linked Server - these are both included in the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Client (10.2.0.4.0) for Vista and Windows 2008 (64 bit).

For installation instructions for the 64-bit Oracle Client, and setup of the Linked Server, see

http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1433

We have tested this setup using the following software versions:

64-bit SQL Server 2005 as the DW repository on the 64-bit Windows Server

32-bit Oracle 10g Client installed on the 64-bit Windows Server

64-bit Oracle 10g Client installed on the 64-bit Windows Server

Oracle 9iR2 as a source system

Oracle 10g as a source system

 

 

 

The SUBWAY® Franchisee-Owned and Operated Company Is Using WhereScape RED to Build Its Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Data Warehouse

SEATTLE–WhereScape, a provider of a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing, announced today that IPC, an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative, has purchased WhereScape RED to enable the rapid development and deployment of its Microsoft SQL Server-based enterprise data warehouse. The announcement was made at PASS Summit 2009, the premier event for SQL Server professionals, where WhereScape is exhibiting in Booth #514.

IPC, headquartered in Miami, Florida, is implementing its new SQL Server data warehouse to gain additional business insights from its terabytes of Subway® Card processing data, finance and supply chain data in support of SUBWAY’s 25,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada. IPC is responsible for procuring all of the SUBWAY food, packaging, equipment and services for the US and Canada through negotiating price, supply, and distribution terms while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY restaurants and their customers.

“IPC looks at all supply chain opportunities that will result in better operations, savings or quality for SUBWAY franchisees,” said Anthony Ronconi, IPC Director of Information Technology. “This is a continuous process with IPC often receiving requests from its members to evaluate taking on new functions. As data volumes continue to grow, our enterprise data warehouse will be key in helping us provide timely data analysis and reports that enable management to make insightful and timely business decisions, benefiting all SUBWAY store owners.”

According to Ronconi, IPC’s initial data warehouse development efforts, while successful, proved too time consuming making it difficult to meet dynamic business requirements. This resulted in the company performing due diligence looking for a cost-effective solution to aid his team. “WhereScape RED’s ‘prototype and iterate’ data warehouse-building approach is ideal for IPC as our business requirements and needs are constantly evolving and changing. In addition, WhereScape RED has greatly increased the productivity of our developers and our results to date have impressed both our IT group as well as our stakeholders. We have been very pleased with the purchase and progress we are now making,” Ronconi said.

IPC’s enterprise data warehouse consists of several massive modules including card model, store model, finance and supply chain. For example, just one of the activity fact tables contains more than one billion records, with the enterprise data warehouse containing almost two terabytes of data and growing daily. “The data contained in each of these modules is quite complex, and WhereScape is enabling us to effectively manage that complexity,” Ronconi said. Two major modules?card model and store model?have completed testing and have been placed into production. The supply chain module is expected to be in production by year-end, and the finance data will be incorporated into the data warehouse in a multi-phased approach throughout next year.

Ronconi added that IPC has also been highly impressed with the metadata-based documentation-creating capabilities of WhereScape RED. “We have complex reporting relationships in the IPC data warehouse between business units and models, without which proper documentation is very hard to understand for a user, yet alone communicate to other IPC technical resources,” he said. “As we make changes to our data warehouse, WhereScape allows us to automatically regenerate the documentation to reflect the changes.”

“We are pleased to welcome IPC to the WhereScape customer family and honored to be playing a key role in this high profile data warehouse development effort,” said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead. “WhereScape RED ensures that IPC and other organizations can not only quickly and cost-effectively develop data warehousing solutions, but also easily adapt and change the environment as business needs dictate. IPC is in good company, joining more than 100 other SQL Server customers enjoying the productivity, ease of use and cost benefits of the SQL Server and WhereScape combination.”

Fully Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server

WhereScape RED provides native support for SQL Server as well as IBM DB2, Oracle and Teradata. The same WhereScape integrated development environment is used to build SQL Server data warehouses as well as Analysis Services cubes. The benefits are simple – organizations only need to learn one development environment, end to end metadata from the source system through to the cube layer (and where supported the client tool as well), integrated workflow and scheduling for the data warehouse and the cubes, automatically maintained lineage information and documentation from source system extract through to the data warehouse and the cubes.

About IPC

IPC is an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative. IPC negotiates the lowest cost for goods and services, while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY® restaurants and their customers. Moreover, IPC is committed to delivering returns to its members year after year. By organizing as a cooperative, the business initiatives are set by the owner members and are benchmarked by the active participation of an elected Board of Directors. For more information, please visit, www.ipcoop.com.

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle, integrating source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.

More than 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand, Portland Oregon, and Wokingham, UK. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.