How can the information in an RDBMS be converted from a drill press into a pile of cash?
Add flexibility!
A drill press does one thing very well, while cash can be used to accomplish many objectives. The structure of data in an RDBMS defines the boundaries of its use just as the motors, gears and levers of a drill press define its use.
A data structure that allows complete flexibility of use frees the corporate information asset to be used more like cash. As long as data is stored in records and indexed for access, it will do one thing very well and it will require armies of smart people to make it deliver minimal results for all other information functions.
There are some relatively new options for supporting information discovery and analytics in the market today that were not available when most data warehouses were being planned and implemented.
Column structure was introduced by Sybase and other companies have joined in with their new products. Value based structure is available only from Illuminate today.
Column structured database systems store data in columns rather than records. Adding a new record in this structure requires splitting the new record into individual values and then updating the column sets individually. Retrieving information involves finding the desired value in a column and the retrieving all of the values from the same relative position in all other columns. While this may sound complicated and difficult, it actually takes advantage of the fact that processor cycles are cheap and plentiful while disk bandwidth is limited and expensive. This structure reduces the I/O load and disk usage when compared to record structures.
The value based structure stores unique data values once in a data pool and maintains an indexing system that reconstructs the records as needed. Like the column structure, this structure uses processor cycles to reduce I/O. However, the value based structure reduces I/O even more than the column structure and makes possible new analytical and discovery functions that are unique to this structure. This is as close as information gets to cash today.
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