RE: Is there an midrange Data Warehouse forum or, if not...

Mike,

From what I can tell SPSS is pretty feature rich but have not used it myself...yet. When I get to the point of sophisticated analysis tools in this project, I'll compare it with MicroStrategies and Cognos tools, etc. One of the things you have to watch with these tools is where they want to store the data to do their analysis and where they do their analysis. In one of my previous lives, we used MicroStrategies tools and Cognos. Each has it strengths and weaknesses. If memory serves, Gognos wants to load all data needed for a particular analysis onto your PC and analyze there. You might need a big pipe for that plus a robust "knowledge-worker" PC. Again, if memory serves, MicroStrategies does its work at the server but, of course, that means you'd better have the horsepower.

For basic ETL, IBM's Data Propagator and DB2 UDB (PC) Replication Center do a pretty good job. And the price is not too bad compared to some ETL tools that can cost A LOT more; but they do more. In my previous life, we found that no ETL tool would do the "cleansing" we
needed so we had to "roll are own"; you'd better have the people that can do it as it's not trivial. But, without good "clean" data, you won't get correct answers to your analysis.

IBM's DataQuant is a pretty good, and inexpensive query, reporting and basic analysis tool but if you need the power of an SPSS, then you're probably beyond DataQuant.

IBM's Federated Server Architecture (used to be called IBM Information Integrator) and toolset is good for talking to various RDBMs, like DB2 (VM, MVS), DB2 UDB (Windows, AIX, Linux), DB2/400, AND ORACLE, MS SQLServer and the other world class DBMs. I think it can even talk to IMS. This provides you the ability to not only do bi-directional connections to these DBMs, but to do Distributed Queries, which you can't do otherwise as far as I've been able to discover.


Thanks,

Dave