Sapior Introduces Redbridge High Performance Surrogate Key Mapping Tool; Specialised Surrogate Key Look-up and Generation Engine for Data Warehouses and Marts.

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 8, 2001

Sapior Ltd. today unveiled Redbridge(tm), a specialised surrogate key mapping tool for high performance data integration.

Redbridge facilitates the integration of customer data across multiple sources by providing universal customer identifiers and by managing changes in corporate data specifically for data warehouses and marts experiencing high data volumes and arrival rates.

"During my years as a data warehousing consultant, I uncovered a distinct lack of commercial solutions for the computationally-challenging process of surrogate key mapping, despite the strong recommendation of its use by many data warehousing gurus," says co-founder and Sapior Managing Director, Robert Navarro. "For organisations integrating customer information across the entire enterprise, we've designed Redbridge to drop into existing Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) environments and efficiently process hundreds of gigabytes of data. Redbridge offers timely data integration for customer-focused initiatives at a fraction of the cost of expensive custom solutions."

Key Mapping for a Complete and Timely Customer View

Using Redbridge to replace natural keys with surrogate keys in a warehouse effectively lowers the incremental cost of adding a new source. This makes the addition of sources an extremely easy and painless process, thus encouraging further data integration. For the Star-schema data mart, Redbridge eliminates the development of dependencies on upstream data, which would require substantial database reloads. The result is a more complete and timely picture of each customer's activity, leading to more accurate sales and marketing programs, as well as tailored products and services.

Rapid Implementation & Easy Administration

Redbridge can be implemented in less than a week, as compared to the typical four to five months for a custom solution. It offers a host of administrative features to facilitate maintenance including RAM and processor allocation, as well as a Validation Mode. Its portable design supports a wide range of platforms and configurations, thus leveraging the staff training investment. In addition, the tool uses an open data format, rendering Redbridge surrogate keys readily accessible to database loaders or other utilities that can handle binary numerics.

Flexible, Powerful Surrogate Key Processing

Designed to meet the unique needs of a wide range of corporate data environments, Redbridge supports all input datatypes, accepts records of different lengths or that change format over time, processes multiple surrogate keys per row and produces variable surrogate key formats. Redbridge can operate on an infinite or continuous stream of data, making it suitable for execution within dataflow managers such as Ab Initio(tm) or Torrent Orchestrate(tm). The Sapior tool also executes multiple sessions concurrently on the same surrogate keys whilst coordinating updates amongst these sessions.

Whitepaper on Surrogate Key Problem

To download a Sapior whitepaper discussing the nature of the surrogate key problem, visit http://www.sapior.com/Product/product.html.

Pricing and Availability

Generally available, Redbridge currently runs on IBM/AIX and Linux platforms and works with front-end interfaces - Informatica PowerCenter(tm) and Unix shell command. For pricing and product information, please contact Sapior at [phone].

About Sapior

Based in London, Sapior Ltd. develops software to facilitate data integration and manage changes in corporate data, enabling companies to execute customer-focused initiatives. Used by leading companies like UBS AG, Sapior Redbridge is a high performance surrogate key mapping tool for data warehouses and marts. Sapior maintains strategic relationships with leading consulting firms and Data Management companies, including Informatica Corporation and IBM. For more information, visit www.sapior.com.

Sapior and Redbridge are trademarks of Sapior Ltd. All other products and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.