Red Brick Formation 1.3 from Red Brick Systems, Inc. (dynamic and scalable data extraction, transformation and movement)
Platforms: Solaris, Windows NT, HP-UX
Price: from $7,500 per seat for Architect; $50,000 to $100,000 for Engine
URL: http://www.redbrick.com

Red Brick Formation enables analytic application designers and information technologists to quickly and easily create, manage and evolve complex data integration routines. These features enable companies to adapt information flow to match changing business processes and decision-makers' needs. Red Brick Formation is designed to load and transform production-scale data sets among data warehouses and data marts of any size running on Windows NT or Unix.

The combination of Red Brick Formation with Red Brick Warehouse, Red Brick's relational database designed specifically for data warehousing, provides a base for building and deploying decision support projects and analytic applications. These products are integrated in the comprehensive Red Brick DecisionScape environment of products, services, methodology and partnerships for successful decision support solutions.

Red Brick Formation consists of a single, integrated, client-server application, which includes Red Brick Formation Architect and Red Brick Formation Flow Engine.

Red Brick Formation Architect enables designers to visually define end-to-end, complex data integration processes by drawing data flow diagrams that capture business rules. Data definitions may be custom or imported from industry standard sources. Designers may choose from more than 200 pre-defined transformation and logic functions such as "duplicate deletion" and "householding." Designers may also develop custom transformations or call out to third-party programs for specialized tasks. Built-in and custom operators may be combined to solve the most challenging data preparation problems among multiple sources and multiple targets.

Once a data integration job has been defined, the designer specifies the run- time environment and allocates resources. The data integration job may then be deployed to any Windows NT or UNIX computer running a Red Brick Formation Flow Engine.

Red Brick Formation Flow Engine is a server-based component that executes the data integration jobs created using Red Brick Formation Architect. It combines the pre-built operators with custom logic and manages job execution. The Red Brick Formation Flow Engine handles large data volumes using a "one-pass" architecture that automatically takes advantage of parallelism in multi-processor machines.

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