Real Time is the Right Time

(Aug 1, 2005)

Real Time Is the Right Time

By Alan R. Earls

Talking Points
NEED FOR SPEED

• There’s an undeniable trend toward faster and better access to ever-increasing amounts of data. This one is evolutionary, more often based on existing
  investments and familiar products.
• Instead of extract, transform and load, data warehouses need to do something that is more like data integration, transform and load.
• Driven by demand for real time, ETL vendors have begun to move away from the idea of microbatches to real time by exposing their ETL engines as a service.

Although the U.S. Air Force might be best known for its awe-inspiring fighter jets and precision-guided rockets, it’s also a vast global organization that depends on smooth and efficient business practices. So, in the late 1990s, when the service was faced with pressures to squeeze more performance from a massive $37 billion annual budget, the Air Force hatched plans to create a global data warehouse backed by financial management analysis and executive decision support tools called CRIS, short for the Commanders’ Resource Integration System.

Because the Air Force’s data was widely scattered among many systems, the system engineers chose scale-out architecture based on independent modules running on top of a SQL Server, according to David Reeves, marketing manager at Teksouth, which built the system.

The system had to deliver all kinds of information to a huge and varied user audience, and it had to do it as much as possible in real time. Today, in its current refined form, CRIS provides for ad hoc queries as well as flash Web views for managers who want a broad, up-to-date overview and extensive drill-down capability. Most important, CRIS fulfills the mantra of faster and better, more than doubling the number of users served between 2003 and 2004, and handling a five-fold increase in individual queries while reducing response time to seconds.

Says Reeves, “What it boils down to is that because queries can now be performed for pennies, in addition to being fast, this is also data warehousing for the masses.” The Air Force’s CRIS is part of an undeniable trend toward faster and better access to ever-increasing amounts of data. For many organizations, the benefits are obvious.

That’s because unlike some other IT trends, which have turned out to be built on shaky new technology, this one is evolutionary, more often based on existing investments and familiar products. In short, it takes money and time, but it’s not rocket science.

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More information is available by phone at 800-842-1470.

For customers interested in learning more about Teksouth Corporation:
Ken Craig
PHONE: 205.631.1500