Informix to target verticals with new database bundles

Informix Software, the database product unit of Informix Corporation, has unveiled a new analytical database package designed to offer real-time analysis for time-stamped financial data for capital markets.

The move is part of the company`s overall 2001 market strategy, which will see it target specific vertical markets, including telecommunications and manufacturing, with new product bundles.

The package, Financial Foundation, is built on the Informix Dynamic Server (IDS), and is bundled with various datablades - software modules that add customised functionality and processing capabilities directly to the database.

"Although the technology itself is not new, the real-time capability is new," says Simon Jeggo, country manger for Informix SA. "Financial Foundation enables users to efficiently store, retrieve, update and manipulate large volumes of complex time-stamped data such as stock transactions in real-time."

He says that in internal tests, Financial Foundation has demonstrated the capacity to load and analyse up to 25 000 stock ticks per second in real-time. "The reason it achieves such fast responses is because IDS uses vector technology, where the data in each column is stored together, instead of row orientation used by most relational databases. This is designed to optimise data storage and retrieval, saving as much as 50% in terms of space."

Another benefit of Financial Foundation, Jeggo says, is that the analytic capabilities have been brought into the database server. Historically financial analysts have had to take data out of the database to the client side, run the analysis, and send the results back. By bringing the analytical process closer to the data source, it can bring greater time advantages, which is crucial in the financial world.

"Providing analytical functionality within the database is clearly the way the market is heading; Informix has offered analytical functionality within the database for the past year, through its NAG (Numerical Algorithm Group) datablade," Jeggo adds.