IBM RedBrick

IBM Red Brick™ Warehouse 6.3 delivers powerful, integrated analytics for business intelligence on demand.

The latest release of IBM Red Brick Warehouse -- version 6.3 -- can manage huge amounts of complex data, integrate with existing technologies to preserve your IT investments, and scale to meet the expanding needs of your business. It is available in two configurations: Red Brick Workgroup Edition and Red Brick Enterprise Edition.

Red Brick Workgroup Edition 6.3 is ideal for small- to medium-size businesses and departmental solutions that require the power of an enterprise database on a system with up to two processors. Red Brick Enterprise Edition 6.3 provides all of the features of the Workgroup Edition for SMP systems with three or more processors.


Highlights


•High-speed, high-volume query performance with support for thousands of users


•High-performance information management


•Linear scalability that accommodates many terabytes on SMP hardware


•Low cost of ownership through greatly simplified maintenance




Performance enhancements


•Dynamic segment elimination: Complementing compile-time SmartScan optimizations, the server also supports run-time or dynamic segment elimination. This further optimizes data access for table scans and TARGETjoins that use local indexes. Segment elimination is factored when determining the correct query plan to choose.


•Memory mapping for queries: To optimize access to dimension tables and their primary-key indexes. These objects are partially or wholly memory-mapped during query execution.


•TARGETjoin performance improvements: The performance of TARGETjoin queries is optimized, and single-column B-TREE indexes can now participate in TARGETjoin plans.


•Optimizer directives: The server supports SET commands for controlling the availability of specific STAR indexes for single and multifact joins and for adjusting thresholds that influence the overall choice of STARjoin and TARGETjoin plans.


•Vista Enhancement: Precomputed views grouped by nullable columns can now be maintained incrementally.


•Table Management Utility (TMU): Loader enhancements are made in memory usage and tuning.




Ease-of-use enhancements


•Alter Table with working segment: You can add or drop table columns into a predefined working segment. This option provides greater reliability and recoverability than other ALTER TABLE modes.


•Additional SQL OLAP functions: The server supports additional functions for analytic queries: PERCENT_RANK, CUME_DIST, PERCENTILE_CONT, and PERCENTILE_DISC. The server also supports the ROUND scalar function.


•Expression support: You can define arithmetic expressions and conditional CASE expressions for input columns inside the TMU control file.


•Shrink system catalog: To improve performance, you can use the rb_syscompact utility to reduce the size of the database system catalog.


•3GB address space on the Microsoft Windows platform: To improve scalability and performance, Red Brick executable's can use up to 3GB of virtual address space on the Windows platform.


•Multicharacter delimiter support: To extend delimiter support in the Table Management Utility (loader) and Export.


•Nested XML namespace support: To extend definition of XML data for loading.


•Support for .NET applications through the ODBC.NET data provider: Applications can use Microsoft's ODBC.NET provider and the .NET Framework 1.1 with the Red Brick ODBC driver to access data from Red Brick data warehouse.


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