Sybase upgrades IQ database

Sybase is touting full text search and query federation capabilities in the latest release of its Sybase IQ database, reports eWeek.

Building on last year's update, in Sybase IQ 15.2 the company has added the ability to extract information currently locked in e-mail, file systems and other unstructured formats in a bid to improve analytics.

Users can retrieve information by searching for multiple or alternative words and phrases and scoring the frequency with which a term occurs within a document.

Lots of business people are captivated by the idea of using predictive analytics, but not every organisation has analytics gurus on staff. IBM plans to bridge that gap with IBM SPSS Decision Management software, states InformationWeek.

"It used to be that if you're trying to do what-if modelling, you had to turn to statisticians, but there are only so many analytics Jedi Knights," comments Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group.

"This new platform enables millions of business analysts to do what used to require statisticians, so it's going to open up a whole new range of things that organisations can do for themselves," he adds.

On-demand business intelligence (BI) vendor Oco has unveiled version 4.0 of its platform, a release that contains multiple new functions aimed at serving large enterprises, says PC World.

Features, such as support for multinational character sets and around-the-clock system availability, target the needs of companies with operations in multiple countries.

Another feature alerts users in real-time about whether a report they are using has become outdated by new information being added to the system.