The Challenge
The emergence of Internet-enabled dynamic trade, increased competition and the explosive growth in new, complex business and service models, means organizations need to better access, understand and exploit information resources to perform and prosper. They need insight. But insight is hard to get. Over the next few years, organizations will have to deal with a massive increase in the amount of available data. The data is also becoming more complex; there are more business and service partners, more products and services, more markets and client groups and many more relationships and dependencies. Current approaches for accessing, storing, manipulating and analysing large, complex datasets are problematic.
- They are can be hard to use and expensive - often requiring a high level of skill and lots of CPU cycles.
- Many of them represent an unhappy compromise between performance and data visibility and accessibility. In other words they 'lose' granularity and flexibility in favour of producing 'standardized reports' (which address yesterday's questions) and multi-dimensional analytical cubes. It is impossible to generate cubes covering all permutations and combinations of variables, a cube represent a best guess at what might be of interest.
- They rarely provide straightforward analytical processing solutions where complex relationships among variables and particular records have to be identified and assessed.
- None of them provide the rich metadata management functionality needed to manage information concepts and standards and to provide a knowledge base for explanation and analysis.
Space-Time Research's Solution
The SuperSTAR software suite delivers insight by enabling users to manipulate and analyze any quantitative data at any aggregation level they choose, from microdata (transactions, customer records, etc) to macrodata (aggregated data). In contrast to other analytical and reporting tools (usually categorised as 'online analytical processing' (OLAP) packages) SuperSTAR uses an advanced, proprietary database structure that delivers extraordinary performance for analytical operations. This enables SuperSTAR to work directly from microdata, rather than summarized data. It also means that SuperSTAR can be implemented on much cheaper hardware platforms than alternatives.
SuperSTAR compresses large, quantitative microdata sets such as transactions, personnel records, customer profiles, census, asset registers, taxation records, and communications network performance data into a proprietary format which is then accessed by a very high performance query and tabulation engine driven by a unique and easy-to-use interface. While the software has some similarities to online analytical processing (OLAP) packages, it is unique in that it operates directly on microdata without performance penalty. This means that in contrast to other OLAP packages and relational databases, any query can be asked and answered online and the microdata records contributing to the answer can be identified immediately.
In addition, SuperSTAR has been developed in such a way that complex relationships among and between individual records are explicitly recognised when SuperSTAR databases are created. This means that SuperSTAR users can specify very complex queries against microdata using simple 'point and click' instructions. Most OLAP packages cannot do this because they operate against summarized data. Other, more generalized database management systems and the common statistical packages can do it but they need to be programmed, which increases the likelihood of errors and their response times on large datasets are very slow.
SuperSTAR combines this extraordinary underlying technology with a selection of world class data access and visualization capabilities.
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