Users speed feeds to data warehouses

BI tools are playing a more prominent role in operational decision-making

By Heather Havenstein

August 8, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - As business intelligence becomes a critical component of daily operations, real-time data warehouses that can provide end users with rapid updates from transactional systems are increasingly sprouting up at companies.
For example, online retailer Overstock.com Inc. has begun connecting users to a real-time data warehouse it completed last month. The project's goal is to help employees gain insight into the effectiveness of the company's online and e-mail advertising campaigns.
Overstock is using transactional data management tools from GoldenGate Software Inc. to pull information directly from its business systems into the data warehouse, said Jack Garcella, the Salt Lake City-based retailer's vice president of data warehousing, analytics and reporting.
The data warehouse, which is based on NCR Corp.'s Teradata software, will replace a process that used traditional extract, transform and load tools to build reports directly from Overstock's back-end systems. As the retailer grew, the reports stressed the systems and gave employees day-old data, Garcella said. Now the data warehouse receives Web site clickstream data in real time, financial and product-sales data every 15 minutes and other information hourly.
"When we launch campaigns now, we can look within five minutes and see if they are producing lift or revenue that would not normally have happened," Garcella said. "You can't wait until the next day or three hours later to get that data." He declined to specify how much Overstock is spending on the warehousing project, other than to say the cost is in the millions of dollars.
Harrah's Entertainment Inc. is testing a real-time data warehouse that combines operational and historical customer data, said Tim Stanley, the Las Vegas-based gaming company's CIO.
The new setup is based on an architecture that Harrah's developed in mid-2002. The company is using adapters from Tibco Software Inc. to feed information from transactional systems into its Teradata warehouse to help workers interact with customers at Harrah's properties, on the phone or on the Harrah's Web site.


Tim Stanley, CIO of Harrah's Entertainment Inc. Image Credit: Martin Le Pire/KlixPix

"It uses Teradata's transactional database and also has direct access to all the historical data," Stanley said. "You don't have to have two databases talk to each other."
Changing Needs
Eric Rogge, an analyst at Ventana Research Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., said that because business intelligence tools are being used more often for operational decision-making, many companies are finding that they need to refresh their data warehouses more frequently than on a nightly basis.
"It's not about loading a data warehouse so a small department of business

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