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Colin White

I like the various blogs associated with my many hobbies and even those to do with work. I find them very useful and I was excited when the Business Intelligence Network invited me to write my very own blog. At last I now have somewhere to park all the various tidbits that I know are useful, but I am not sure what to do with. I am interested in a wide range of information technologies and so you might find my thoughts will bounce around a bit. I hope these thoughts will provoke some interesting discussions.

About the author >

Colin is the founder and president of BI Research. He is well known for his in-depth knowledge of business intelligence, data management and data integration technologies and how they can be used for supporting smart and agile decision making. With 40 years of IT experience, he has consulted for dozens of companies throughout the world and is a frequent speaker at leading IT events. Colin has written numerous articles and papers on deploying new and evolving information technologies for business benefit and is a regular contributor to several leading print- and web-based industry journals, including the BeyeNETWORK. Colin may be contacted by sending an email to info@bi-research.com .

Editor's note: More articles, resources, news and events are available in Colin's BeyeNETWORK Expert Channel. Be sure to visit today!

FAST Offers Alternative to Traditional Data Warehousing

Fast Search & Retrieval (FAST), a leading search technology provider, has introduced the adaptive information warehouse (AIW), which marries search, BI analysis, and dashboard/portal technologies.

The blending of search into BI has been gaining traction over the past year, but solutions to date focus primarily on using search techniques to access the results of BI processing such as reports and analytics. The FAST approach is different in that it offers an alternative approach to EII data federation and ETL data consolidation integration techniques.

The FAST solution has three main pieces. The first is constructing a full search index of the source data. Both unstructured and structured data can be indexed. The FAST index can be used instead of a data warehouse as a data source for BI processing. The second piece is the FAST Data Cleansing Solution, which uses linguistics to improve the quality of the information in the index. The third component is FAST Radar, which creates analytical dashboards from information in the index and also other data sources.

FAST AIW does not replace traditional data warehousing and BI approaches, but offers an attractive solution for certain types of BI application and data, especially in situations where there isn't the time or resources to construct a data warehouse using traditional methods.


Posted January 31, 2007 10:57 AM
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