INFORMATION WAREHOUSE

The need to access complex information real time at various analyzing / consolidation levels, opens a real challenge in information mining and retrieval.

Our clients are dealing with Information Warehouse, holding Terabytes of Data with billions records when dealing with POS information. Dealing with such amount of data has led Soft Solutions to build its own information warehouse space, closely connected to the MDM - transactional information model but designed to provide real time access to evolving information.

Depending on the context, Soft Solutions can implement Hexa or Column-based technologies when deploying the ibs KPI solution.

Both of them are able to deal with the below objectives:

• Provide real-time information to high-level consolidation data
• Ability to update consolidation levels (changes in MHE structures, stores reallocation in different zones…)
• Ability to update information set several times a day and provide the technology to offer updated data to the KPI dashboards
• Provide good level of configuration / flexibility to provide our expertise to the retailers
• Ability to deal with multi-national contexts (different units of measure and currencies)
• The KPI information warehouse is the technical ground allowing the ibs KPI solution to provide the right figures at the right time and in the right format

THE "HEXA" APPROACH

The Hexa approach has been developed by Soft Solutions laboratory analyzing the following statements:

• Data Management solutions such as Oracle, or other data bases systems have great ability in data indexing for fast retrieval
• However they have important limitations when dealing with a large amount of information (space-consuming encoding of information, limited amount of columns, decrease in performances when increase in space)

At the opposite, last century solutions based on flat files and direct in-memory access through pointers and scripts, react in great performances, but without any control on the information, integrity or indexing features.

Soft Solutions has then decided to combine benefits from both approaches, using Data base systems as indexing engine (hash-maps, bitmap indexes, pyramidal approaches), storing keys in dedicated column and information into a single hexadecimal column to tackle the decrease of space and performances when the scope of information enlarges.

With such storage and on-the-fly procedures to code / decode the 'Hexa' information, the KPI data warehouse achieves best performances for data access saving space and leading to speed up transaction and integration processes.

THE "COLUMN BASED" APPROACH

Parallel to 'Hexa' approach using installed and broadly used tools (Oracle, MySQL and others), Soft Solutions stays at the edge of the technology initiating column-oriented storage of information.

When dealing with Analytical context, such approach allow better performances than classical row-based storages with less efforts in configuration.

Comparing benchmarks with actual retailers data, has shown benefits from 2 to 10 in retrieving information.

Upper the required consolidation level is, greater the benefit of using column-based approaches will be.

Soft Solutions stays opened to new technologies and ready to deploy it providing the best of retail knowledge embedded within the most efficient solutions.