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FAST Offers Alternative to Traditional Data Warehousing

Fast Search & Retrieval (FAST), a leading search technology provider, has introduced the adaptive information warehouse (AIW), which marries search, BI analysis, and dashboard/portal technologies.

The blending of search into BI has been gaining traction over the past year, but solutions to date focus primarily on using search techniques to access the results of BI processing such as reports and analytics. The FAST approach is different in that it offers an alternative approach to EII data federation and ETL data consolidation integration techniques.

The FAST solution has three main pieces. The first is constructing a full search index of the source data. Both unstructured and structured data can be indexed. The FAST index can be used instead of a data warehouse as a data source for BI processing. The second piece is the FAST Data Cleansing Solution, which uses linguistics to improve the quality of the information in the index. The third component is FAST Radar, which creates analytical dashboards from information in the index and also other data sources.

FAST AIW does not replace traditional data warehousing and BI approaches, but offers an attractive solution for certain types of BI application and data, especially in situations where there isn't the time or resources to construct a data warehouse using traditional methods.

  Posted by Colin White on January 31, 2007 10:57 AM |

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