Sybase yesterday announced the upcoming general availability of Sybase IQ 15.2, the latest version of the analytics server. With full text search, query federation and web-enabled analytics, IQ 15.2 delivers faster and consistently more accurate business answers and reporting by turning raw data into actionable information through analytics.
This new release continues the Sybase IQ 15 family's overarching theme of smarter analytics, Tom Traubitz, director, Sybase IQ product marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "For this release ‘smarter' means being able to do in database text search so that you can actually incorporate text within the database, and search it as part of analytics queries."
Text Search and Analysis will enable the extractionof key business insights currently locked in email, file systems, and other unstructured formats, and users will be able to retrieve relevant documents by searching for multiple or alternative words and phrases and scoring the frequency with which a term occurs within a document. "We are the first columnar database to do this," says Traubitz.
"Typical analytics is very quantitative, numbers-oriented and decision making is based on those hard facts, but decision making also involves qualitative data that is not always captured by numbers," points out Joydeep Das, director, product management, data warehousing and analytics. "And some of that qualitative data exists in textual format - emails, documents, forms, all kinds of sources that are written in language. The idea of bringing the text search capability into our analytics platform is to be able to extract this qualitative information and bring it into the decision making fold, and combine it with our traditional quantitative techniques. This really makes the platform more robust. You don't have to depend on two or three different types of technologies or product sets."
Additionally, in Sybase IQ 15.2, query federation provides immediate access to information previously unavailable due to data movement or copyright restrictions. Users can access information without it having to be moved or copied to a data warehouse, allowing for a greater reach of analysis and decision-making based upon a more holistic view of an organization's data. "We are also the first for columnar databases to do that," Traubitz states.
In other new functionality IQ 15.2, for existing Sybase ASE clientele, says Traubitz, "We are focusing on providing real-time loading with Rep Server. Rep Server 15.5 is being released with new real-time loading capabilities for Sybase IQ."
Additionally, Traubitz notes, "We have added role-based administration." Role-based security is important to clients who are moving up from analytics servers to enterprise data warehouses, for example, where they require more sophisticated security administration because of the number of users. "Being able to classify users by their job role and then assign those privileges by that role is often a very popular way of managing the complexity of security in an enterprise environment."
And for developers, IQ 15.2 extends support for leading Web 2.0 development tool languages - such as Python, PERL, PHP, ADO.net and OLE-DB - so that developers can quickly and more easily develop and test prototype models and bring dynamic analytical applications to the web.
Sybase IQ 15.2 is scheduled to be released on June 11, 2010. To learn more about Sybase IQ and the additional features and benefits of Sybase IQ 15.2, go here.