Dimensional Insight, a developer of business intelligence (BI) solutions for complex and highly regulated industries, today announced the launch of Spectre as part of Version 7.0 of its award-winning BI platform, Diver Platform™. The powerful data engine is built on the latest columnar database technology, which enables the greatest speed and efficiency for the most used analytics features. With the addition of Spectre, the latest version of the company’s flagship product is now faster, scalable, and more manageable in meeting the needs of today’s BI users.
The most fundamental difference in Spectre’s technology is the new column-oriented, shareable database storage format optimized for query-time calculations instead of build-time calculations. In the columnar database design, fields for each record are separated into categories by similarity and are stored together in blocks of memory. This allows for only the relevant columns to be accessed during a calculation, resulting in an enhanced level of speed and efficiency. The new design also takes advantage of hardware innovations and analysis practices to better handle new user behaviors and queries.
“By offering the latest advancement in columnar technology, Spectre is able to address many of the difficulties BI users face with the growth of data and reliance on traditional relational databases,” said Jamie Clark, senior developer, Dimensional Insight. “We designed Spectre from the ground up by creating an engine that is fast, flexible and works to simplify data collection. The end result is powerful and streamlined BI for our customers.”
Key technology and design features of Spectre include:
– Speed – Spectre is built for speed, both for builds and for calculations. This increased speed significantly boosts productivity of IT staff and response time for users.
– Scalability – The engine was designed to be robust enough for challenging enterprise-level BI analysis and to deliver fast performance without taxing resources.
– Manageability – Because users need rapid information access and IT needs to make sure they can manage and support user requirements, Diver Platform combined with Spectre delivers on both of these needs with Workbench for developers and DiveTab™ to keep the mobile workforce connected on the go.
“Spectre has allowed us to go from refreshing large data sets twice per day, to once per hour, allowing us to make quicker decisions based on more recent pre-calculated data,” said Tony Maturo, operations controller at Fieldale Farms. “Additionally, the integration of previously separate tools in Workbench 7.0 allows us to get more work done in less time. It also has helped enable us to achieve ‘Google-like speed’ within Diver.”
