NT data marts: start small, think big - companies deploying smaller Windows NT-based departmental data warehouses - includes related articles on upcoming products, scalability issues - Product Information

Software Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Barbara Francett

Does size really matter? Just ask companies like Oakley, Scientific-Atlanta, and GTE Wireless, which are deploying smaller, NT-based data marts and letting their IS departments run the show.

Talk about serendipity: Windows NT steamrolls its way into popularity as a low-end alternative to Unix. At the same time, IS managers turn to data marts as tactical decision-support solutions. For many, the result is -- for once -- a harmonious mesh of technology and business need, augmented by the proliferation of Web browsers and the use of the Internet for distributing applications.

Just a couple of years ago, IS managers were scrambling to design and build data warehouses that could house a plethora of information catering to every facet of the business. The result? Many of these top-down, enterprise-scale efforts failed because they were too extensive, too expensive, and simply took too long.

"We had a bad experience [with] a data warehouse," says Jon Krause, director of IT at Oakley Inc., a $220 million sunglasses manufacturer in Foothill Ranch, Calif. "First, you have to define the model, then figure out how to populate the data warehouse. That takes a couple of years, and by then, requirements change."

Switching to a bottom-up approach allowed Oakley to take a sales and financial data mart from design to implementation in a matter of months. The company started the project last November, and the mart has been in operation since May. "The need for better access to information and better use of our data was clear, and we wanted to provide quick value to our users," Krause says.

Currently handling only a gigabyte of data, the data mart uses PowerPlay, a multidimensional OLAP tool from Cognos, and Broadbase, an NT-based data mart and tool suite from Broadbase Information Systems. Though the mart is considered a tactical solution now, the long-term strategy is to evolve it into a multi-subject data warehouse as it expands to encompass customer service and manufacturing data, Krause says.

Oakley will continue to base all the subject areas on a single data model. "It's important to keep a `single instance' of data to hit against," he says. Third-party data from retail customers may also be included in the warehouse, so Oakley's IT group is now working on defining a format to ensure that "external data matches internal data," Krause says.

Exterminating Skunks

From an IS perspective, data marts are quick and cheap to design, populate, access, and maintain -- which translates into development flexibility, quick pay back, and happy end users. Moreover, by driving data mart development themselves, rather than reacting to departmentally grown marts, IS can prevent standalone, "skunkworks" databases, which lack consistency or a common infrastructure, from gaining a foothold.

"We managed to kill about six skunkworks projects with this [mart]," says Tim McCutcheon, director of information management at Bell Canada, referring to the firm's financial reporting data mart, which is based on Arbor's Essbase OLAP database running on NT. Not only were these rogue projects producing some 16,000 reports and costing the company about $1 million annually, "when we put the data into our SQL Server [data warehouse], nothing balanced," McCutcheon says.

One of the factors fueling the growth of these IS-driven data marts is the upward march of the Windows NT operating system. At Sun Chemical Corp., the world's largest manufacturer of commercial printing inks, plates, and film, NT is an integral part of the company's Sun 2000 project. Sun 2000 goals are to update core logistics, manufacturing support, and accounting systems, replace all legacy systems, and develop and implement appropriate data marts, all by the year 2000. The project also sets standards for all divisions worldwide.

"A pillar of [this] standardization is the NT platform on Intel and DEC Alpha hardware for database and file servers," says David Fritz, manager of data warehousing and reporting for the Ft. Lee, N.J.-based firm. Manufacturing and logistics, as well as financial operational systems, use SQL Server databases on NT platforms. "From these we create separate reporting environments" using the Sagent Data Mart suite of tools for extracting, cleansing, and moving data from the transactional to financial and sales data marts, he says.

According to Fritz, NT is an attractive platform because it is less expensive than a Unix-based solution and goes "hand-in-hand" with SQL Server. "I like the integration. It makes the database easier to manage," he says.

Another benefit is NT's ease of use and administration, which also allows companies to get data marts up and running quickly. At Scientific-Atlanta Inc., a $1.2 billion manufacturer of radio-frequency antennas and cable, broadband, and satellite communications equipment, a seven-member IT group took a test-results data mart from design to operation in four months. "It would have been impossible to do [the same job] with Unix with seven people, and we would have needed a Unix system administrator," says Jim Kirchner, data mining engineer.