WhereScape RED Technical Benefits
WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive data warehouse life cycle management software available in the market today. Because it comprehends and explicitly supports all the complexities of the entire data warehouse life cycle in a business-driven team-oriented environment, WhereScape RED offers data warehousing practitioners and their internal customers a range of benefits simply not available from traditional ETL and design tools.
Raw Power, Rapid Assimilation and Task-At-Hand Flexibility
WhereScape RED is built around modern database management systems and their dynamic SQL dialects, rather than proprietary languages and repository models. WhereScape RED both leverages the increasingly astounding power of modern DBMSs and ensures that its design and operation are familiar to experienced database management system professionals.
Because WhereScape’s Pragmatic Data Warehousing™ methods and practices are built into WhereScape RED, any competent database administrator can become a competent data warehouse designer in a matter of days, using WhereScape RED.
And, since WhereScape’s PDW methods are gently suggested, rather than rigidly enforced, experienced data warehousing practitioners with particular design problems or needs can exploit WhereScape RED using whatever methods and design practices are suitable for the task at hand.
Reduced Project Cost, Complexity and Risk
WhereScape RED allows individual designers or design teams to scope a data warehousing or data marting project, via Live Prototyping™, in a matter of hours or days. Because this can be undertaken in conjunction with project sponsors and actual end-users, WhereScape RED projects are well-specified, accurately sized and accurately costed.
Tested Design Quality
WhereScape RED’s Live Prototyping™ technologies, with their emphasis on incremental schema design using live source data and real-time analyst feedback and design guidance, eliminates the single most significant cause of failed in-production data warehouses and data marts: untested designs that do not meet analyst informational requirements. Schema designed with WhereScape RED can be tested, with real data and real users, before the data warehouse or data mart is put into production, and all artifacts of the schema design process – and in particular end-user design guidance and requirements – can be captured and recovered for subsequent discussion, analysis or justification.
Live Prototyping™ can be used to validate the implementation of an enterprise data model with real data, or to design data mart or presentation layer objects on the fly.
Reduced Design Cycle Time
WhereScape RED’s support for Live Prototyping™ with actual source system data and real-time analyst input and design guidance; built-in support for team development environments (including procedure-level check-in/check-out source code control mechanisms); comprehensive versioning, history and annotation; support for both client-side metadata creation and cube-building; and automatic generation of design documentation all work to reduce the design cycle for a data warehouse or data mart from weeks or months, to days or weeks, while providing for tested design quality before a data warehouse or data mart is deployed in a production environment.
Rapid Deployment™ Cycle Time
WhereScape RED provides a deep and intelligent set of deployment cycle-time reduction tools, including: partitioning wizards; complete in-database transformation using dynamic SQL and user-defined programmatic assistance; automatic creation and population of aggregate, summary and roll-up tables; automated cube creation; automated load scripting; support for native DBMS load interfaces; automated index strategy definition and creation; automated surrogate key creation and key space management; inline editing and error management; and automated documentation creation.
Deployment of WhereScape RED-based warehouses typically occurs within hours of design acceptance and sign-off – the primary gating factor is the actual speed of the data warehouse or data mart load.
Superior Production Support Profile
WhereScape RED shines in production. Its integrated scheduler manages data warehouse population and can be seamlessly integrated into overarching enterprise scheduling regimes and products. Its load process management includes dependency checking, dependency management and complete rollback-and-incremental restart facilities. Data warehouses and data marts may be updated using drop-and-reload, incremental loads and row-wise updates, as particular situations dictate. Index management is entirely automated, and can be overridden or tailored by experienced DBAs. All source and target metadata is maintained automatically and dynamically by the WhereScape RED Repository™, providing complete track-back, trace and compliance/audit capabilities. And, in extreme cases, previous production profiles can be restored from the metadata repository, to return to known-valid states.
Production data warehouses managed with WhereScape RED usually require no more than 25% of a data warehouse administrator’s time and attention.
Fast and Smooth Client-Side Integration
WhereScape RED’s explicit support for all common data warehouse schema forms – normalized, star, snowflake and cube – along with its automatic summary, aggregation and roll-up creation facilities, its in-built cube-building facilities, and the open, transparent WhereScape RED Repository™ make WhereScape RED the best available choice for complex data warehouse and data mart environments that include the industry’s most common best-of-breed client-side query and reporting environments.
Reduced Enhancement Cycle Time
Because the WhereScape RED Repository™ can simultaneously contain and manage past, current and future states of a data warehouse or data mart, and move an in-production implementation backward or forward along that design timeline, enhancements to an in-production data warehouse or data mart managed by WhereScape RED can be prototyped, tested and implemented in a single 24-hour cycle, making WhereScape RED data warehouses optimally responsive to changing end-user analyst requirements.
The WhereScape RED Closed Loop Enhancement™ methodology produces the fastest change cycle time in the industry, bar none.
Full Flexibility, Integration and Configurability
Every aspect of the WhereScape RED data warehouse lifecycle management process is open and transparent. All WhereScape RED generated code can be inspected, modified-in-place or replaced. All WhereScape RED Repository™ metadata can be exported to other environments, or imported from other design tools. WhereScape RED procedures can call, or be orchestrated by, other programmatic support facilities and tools. WhereScape RED is, in short, the most flexible and configurable option for seasoned data warehousing professionals.
End-User Confidence and Commitment
All of WhereScape RED’s functionality and capability – everything that makes WhereScape RED fast and flexible – is implemented with the goal of enabling data warehousing practitioners to increase the confidence, and the commitment, of the end-user communities on whose behalf they work. Live Prototyping™, Rapid Deployment™ and Closed Loop Enhancement™ are all designed, from the ground up, to make user requirements visible, effective and timely. This in turn creates an analytical environment that end-users trust and to which they are committed, which means assured project success for data warehousing practitioners.
Faster, Cheaper, Better Data Warehouses
The end-to-end project support from WhereScape RED has convinced hundreds of organizations worldwide that WhereScape RED is the surest route to faster, less costly and more effective data warehousing environments.