Accelerating e-commerce velocity
Informix and CoSORT have inked a deal that reportedly responds to customer demand for faster processing of information in large data warehouses and data Webhouses. The integration calls for direct use of CoSORT technology within the Ardent DataStage Suite on Unix and NT servers as a DataStage plug-in. (Ardent Software was acquired by Informix in December 1999.)
Ardent DataStage addresses enterprise-level business intelligence requirements, including: scalability; native support for Web-based, mainframe, relational and ERP data; enterprisewide business intelligence metadata management; integrated data quality assessment and cleansing.
The CoSORT package includes several user and programmer interfaces to a parallel processing sort algorithm in a co-routine architecture. Included are: third-party sort replacement and conversion tools; support for more than 100 data and record types; data warehouse ETL (extract, transform and load), join and report generation functionality; SMP resource configuration and recovery; on-line documentation; and online and on-site technical support.
The integration accelerates data staging throughput with CoSORT's interface and symmetric multi-processing (SMP) sort engine, while improving ETL resource usage on servers. Ardent DataStage users will be able to assign a specific number of processes (or threads on NT)--as well as the amount of memory consumed per process, shared memory and overflow disk--used for sorting. CoSORT in turn allows administrators to prioritize sort jobs amid concurrent applications and preserve existing hardware assets.