SyBASe IQA revolutionary solution for high-performance analytics and reporting

INTRODUCTIONSybase – the data management expertsA technological breakthrough for business intelligence: Sybase IQ

beNefITs Of sYbAse IQHigh performance Cost-savingFlexibleOpen

CUsTOmeR sUCCess sTORIesPrémalliance BNP Paribas Securities Services Fortis Bank Belgium BNP Paribas Factor French Atomic Energy CommissionArvato ServicesBrasseries Kronenbourg Eram Le Monde

www.sybase.com

SOLUTIONS GUIDE

A

Sybase, the data management experts

Key Dates

1984 : Sybase founded by Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein in Berkeley, California.

1988 : Sybase is first to market with client/server relational database management engine.

1990 : Sybase is first to deliver open replication technology.

1995 : Sybase leads client/server development tools with PowerBuilder.

2001 : Sybase iAnywhere leads the mobile database market for the fifth consecutive year.

2003 : Sybase is selected as category leader in business intelligence and enterprise data warehousing infrastructure.

2006 : Sybase combines device management, mobile application development and security into the Information Anywhere Suite.

2006 : Sybase acquires Mobile 365 and creates Sybase 365, a wholly-owned subsidiary. The combination makes Sybase the world’s largest provider of mobile messaging services.

2007 : Sybase exceeds one billion dollar revenue mark.

2008 : Sybase IQ analytics server sets a new world record by powering the world’s largest data warehouse on a Sun SPARC® Enterprise M9000 server.

2008 : Sybase launches RAP – The Trading Edition, a next-generation analytics platform for the financial markets.

your information is an asset. Since 1984, Sybase has developed innovative technologies to help you make the most of this valuable resource. Today more than ever, an organization’s efficiency, productivity and responsiveness depend on how it manages and shares information with its employees, clients and partners.

Sybase, the largest software company focused on managing and mobilizing information, anticipated the coming of the information society with its “Unwired enterprise” strategy.

Sybase’s Unwired Enterprise solutions help customers of all sizes:

• Process transactions in real time in sensitive environments where data availability and security are critical.

• Handle exponential growth in their reporting and analytics data.

• Give users real-time access to relevant data, anytime, anywhere, and regardless of technology or device.

• Meet the challenges of a heterogeneous, widely distributed technological environment.

enterprises looking to make better use of their data can trust Sybase to help them find the right solution to meet these challenges. Based on cutting-edge technologies, Sybase’s solutions guarantee market-leading performance for decision support and secure information access and sharing, regardless of location, time, device or platform. Sybase stands for innovation and commitment to open technologies, and its strategy is firmly based on standard, easy-to-integrate solutions.

More than 50,000 customers have already chosen Sybase solutions for critical environments, including the often demanding and highly regulated industries of investment banking and telecommunications. This success resulted in a turnover of over one billion dollars in 2007 with a profit of almost 150 million dollars. Sybase is an independent company quoted on the NySe, and has 4,000 employees in 60 locations throughout the world.

www.sybase.com

Sybase IQ

GIve yOUr USerS THe ULTIMaTe FreeDOM In DaTa anaLySIS

Sybase IQ is a complete relational database management system.

It deploys innovative technologies to overcome the limitations of traditional databases and deliver outstanding performance for interactive analysis in multi-user environments. This makes Sybase IQ the ideal solution for high-workload analytics and reporting environments.

Designed for outstanding performance with any volume of data, Sybase IQ is a pioneering technology that has built a reputation over the years as the market’s leading column-oriented database solution. Its innovative design has revolutionized multidimensional analysis, boosting interactivity, freedom and responsiveness.

TaKe aDvanTaGe OF OUr recOGnISeD exPerTISe

Among Sybase IQ’s innovative features are its indexing and compression technologies, which make it simple and quick to implement.

Users are free to cross-reference data as they choose. Whereas a traditional database can sometimes take hours to produce a response, or even return no result at all, Sybase IQ executes queries in a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds. And Sybase IQ is also easier to maintain than traditional databases, which translates into a significantly lower TCO.

These advantages are the key to Sybase IQ’s current success. Over 1,500 enterprises have already selected Sybase IQ, showing remarkable growth, particularly in emerging markets.

In an increasingly tough business climate, business intelligence systems are one way to stay ahead of the competition.

Analyzing activity, optimizing management and finding correlations between data are indispensable for targeting and increasing market share.

Standard reporting and analytics solutions have one big drawback: their use of traditional databases. Rigid, restrictive and costly to implement and maintain, they fail to provide the freedom and performance users expect. THe SybaSe Iq breaKTHrOUGH

Sybase IQ, a technological breakthrough for business intelligence

“After years of development and gradual customer base growth, Sybase IQ has lately emerged as an important and growing analytic database technology.”

carl Olofson, Vice President of Information Management and Data Integration research at IDC

www.sybase.com

High performance

FOcUS

Performance management doesn’t start at the terabyte mark.

As most enterprises are aware, performance problems don’t just start when you’re dealing with terabytes of data. This applies especially to business intelligence systems.

Sybase IQ was designed to deliver superb performance regardless of data volume. Response times are significantly reduced once you’ve passed the first 100 gigabytes.

Its scalability and its storage and compression mechanisms guarantee that performanceis maintained as the database grows.

In all business intelligence scenarios and regardless of volume, Sybase IQ outperforms traditional databases, especially when it comes to complex queries.

Is it possible to run a business intelligence system on a traditional database without compromising on performance ? Sometimes certainly - provided you invest heavily in development and hardware, that is.

These investments – in aggregates, cubes, partitions, materialized views and other structures – are needed to get around the combined constraints of the database’s schema and the volumes of data involved. The sole purpose of these activities is to prepare the data for specific queries and to pre-calculate results. The Sybase IQ database engine sidesteps this requirement by taking a radically original approach towards optimizing performance. Customers can now achieve a high-performance decision making without any special investment, Sybase IQ creates this technological breakthrough.

verTIcaL STOraGe : a revOLUTIOn In DaTa acceSSSybase IQ uses a column-oriented approach to data storage and access. Transactional databases use a row-oriented approach. Why is this difference so crucial? In order to respond to a business intelligence query, a traditional database scans an entire table and loads a large number of unnecessary columns. Sybase IQ simply loads the appropriate column.

The result: by limiting the amount of data loaded, Sybase IQ reduces the number of times the disk is accessed. The query is executed more speedily and hardware and software resources are spared. In addition, Sybase IQ indexes each column using patented mechanisms. For ad hoc queries, this can mean anything up to 100 times better performance than transactional database management systems can provide.

cOMPreSSIOn : SIMPLe bUT eFFIcIenT aLGOrITHMS Compression has a direct impact on performance. It reduces the number of disk accesses required to process a query.

The combination of vertical storage and compression is very efficient.

Simple algorithms perform very well for columns containing similar data. Thanks to its column-oriented storage model, Sybase IQ makes the most of compression, thus limiting physical access and reducing response times.

ParaLLeL PrOceSSInG : GIvInG every USer THe DaTa THey neeDexecuting a single complex query across a large number of processors might seem like a natural way to save time. However, this approach is both resource-hungry and difficult to implement.

Sybase has worked to reduce the resources consumed by queries, in particular as regards read times. Sybase IQ actually cuts some of the query processing steps – sorting, binary index manipulation, input/output, etc. – into elementary operations, which are then scheduled by the operating system.

This means that you don’t need very powerful hardware to realize significant performance gains, allowing Sybase IQ to use parallel processing for other new purposes, in particular scalability and management of multiple users simultaneously, with optimum performance maintained.

DID yOU KnOw?Sybase IQ is 10 to 1,000 times faster than a traditional database used for analytics. These levels of performance can be expected in multi-user environments and when large volumes of data are involved.

Turbo-charge your reporting!

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Cost-saving

FOcUS

Unique indexing technology

Sybase IQ’s patented indexing technology allows enterprises to index all their data without exploding data volumes.With a traditional DBMS, indexing is a complex operation requiring a great deal of optimization work. Adding a new index always involves a trade-off between data search efficiency on the one hand and storage costs and maintenance times on the other. In general, enterprises opt for the minimum of indexing allowing them to process the most common queries.

Sybase recommends that all information is indexed,however, to ensure that the engine has query solutions that are suitable for all user queries. This full indexing approach is based on simple techniques (data type, number of separate values, etc.), which allow choices to be made quickly and early on in the project implementation process. The index choices can be automated, with PowerDesigner for example.

These techniques are both sparing of disk space, thanks to the compression, and they cut down on design time because of the highly optimized loading techniques.

More and more enterprises are implementing analysis and business intelligence systems to enhance their decision-making capabilities. The results are all too often disappointing, mostly because without the proper tools, processing takes far too long.

Organizations then find themselves implementing urgent, unbudgeted fixes to increase processing power and develop and optimize the system. These considerations eat into budgets, to the detriment of user functionality.

The data warehouse is key. If it is ill-suited to queries, too awkward to administer or develop and too hardware-intensive, it will hamper the project.

Sybase IQ offers a quality/price ratio that helps organizations overcome these obstacles.

HarDware cOSTS reDUceDSybase IQ is implemented on multiprocessor servers that use standard hardware and software. Ability to run on Unix, Linux and Windows, Sybase IQ guarantees excellent performance without excessive hardware requirements.

In contrast to many competitor solutions, estimated data volume is by no means the most important factor when choosing a configuration. Optimized for loading mass data, Sybase IQ reduces volume by compressing data prior to loading. An enterprise can reduce its storage needs by two thirds, sometimes even more.The reduction in volume is all the more significant since Sybase IQ’s performance does not depend on aggregates, materialized views, composite indexes or other physical structures that use up a lot of disk space. To manage the data that is truly useful for analysis, a traditional database generates 5 to 10 times more data than Sybase IQ.

qUIcK TO IMPLeMenTDesigning a data warehouse for analytics involves data manipulation and modeling to optimize the database for the queries it is expected to handle. This is a complex, costly and time-consuming operation which impacts on project delivery time.

Sybase IQ’s indexing technology cuts out much of this development work. Since all the data is fully indexed, developers don’t need to worry about this stage of warehouse design. Under these conditions, it is very easy to optimize the database schema, and this can more or less be done as soon as the environment has been defined.

LeSS aDMInISTraTIOnSybase IQ is an SQL engine and is very easy to administer. Its architecture reduces day-to-day indexing and tuning workloads. Most enterprises save a lot on the costs of maintaining their data warehouse, and database administrators have more time for tasks with greater added value.

DID yOU KnOw?More than 1,500 enterprises are now using Sybase IQ. In 2007, Sybase IQ acquired over 200 new customers worldwide, representing an increase of 20% on the previous year.

(Source: Sybase 2007 Annual Report) To be updated

A highly competitive database

www.sybase.com

Flexible

FOcUS

Unique indexing technology

Sybase IQ’s patented indexing technology allows enterprises to index all their data without exploding data volumes. With a traditional DBMS, indexing is a complex operation requiring a great deal of optimization work. Adding a new index always involves a trade-off between data search efficiency on the one hand and storage costs and maintenance times on the other. In general, enterprises opt for the minimum of indexing allowing them to process the most common queries.

Sybase recommends that all information is indexed,however, to ensure that the engine has query solutions that are suitable for all user queries. This full indexing approach is based on simple techniques (data type, number of separate values, etc.), which allow choices to be made quickly and early on in the project implementation process. The index choices can be automated, with PowerDesigner for example.

These techniques are both sparing of disk space, thanks to the compression, and they cut down on design time because of the highly optimized loading techniques.

Databases are structures that are held together by “joins” - tables and columns which, because of the original database schema, define what is simple and what is complex. In other words, data is ordered and interlinked in accordance with a model specifically designed to prepare it for querying. To optimize performance, aggregates (pre-calculation of data) and indexes (list of data present in the database together with address so it can be retrieved quickly) are added.

These considerations are of course far removed from the minds of users, and search tools conceal this underlying reality. What users want in response to their queries is data that is combined in different ways, filtered and ordered in the way they want. For the user, the objective is to retrieve useful information to help them perform a more in-depth analysis.

a wOrLD OF cOnSTraInTSThe user is, however, seriously hampered by data warehouses that are rigid and restrictive in nature – and diametrically opposed to the objectives of business intelligence.

Designed and structured to respond to specific queries, traditional databases buckle when asked to cross-reference data in an unexpected way. And while some queries can be pre-set, others arise on the fly as users become more skilled, discover the potential of the tool they are using and want to make deeper queries. A business intelligence project can also develop over time and throw up new analysis requirements.These unforeseen queries can have a disastrous impact on database performance: the calculation and data search workload on the engine is colossal. And it might never be possible to process certain queries in a reasonable timeframe because the engine has trouble finding the relevant information. The reason? It wasn’t indexed.

anaLySIS SeT FreeSybase IQ’s revolutionary approach does away with these constraints. enterprises no longer need to implement stopgap measures to optimize performance or add new indexes and aggregates to facilitate data searches.

Sybase IQ’s column-based storage, compression and systematic indexing technologies have a significant impact on performance and make Sybase IQ more than capable of processing any type of query. Indexing is performed dynamically whenever information is loaded to the database. This exhaustive indexing, combined with Sybase IQ’s intrinsic performance advantages, gives users unmatched freedom to cross-reference data. In practical terms, users are no longer constrained by the original database model.

Ad hoc reporting can carried out freely, with no changes required to the existing set-up and no impact on the business intelligence infrastructure.

DID yOU KnOw?In 2007, Gartner placed Sybase IQ in the visionaries quadrant in its “Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant”.

(Source: Gartner Inc, 2007; “Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, 2007” by Donald Feinberg and Mark e. Beyer)

Ad hoc queries made easy

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Open

FOcUS

The paradox of Sybase IQ

Returning data speedily is not much use if it takes a long time to update it to the database.

Updating data is a transactional operation – one that Sybase IQ performs less efficiently than traditional database management systems. When it comes to mass updates, however, Sybase IQ is highly competitive. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the original technologies used by Sybase IQ.

Business intelligence projects require manipulation of the large volumes of data flowing into databases using eTL or batch processing tools.

In this context, Sybase IQ performs particularly wellwhen loading data or with the SQL processes of updating, inserting or purging data on a very large numbers of rows. Ultimately, the nature of the project will determine the update frequency.

Sybase IQ’s performance in mass data loading also enables processing on the fly. This is because data latency is very low compared to operational environments.

Based on the SQL standard language, the Sybase IQ engine has all the advantages of any other relational database on the market. In other words, it is perfectly possible to use standard development tools or business intelligence tools to manage and use the database.Foremost among such tools is Sybase’s modeling tool PowerDesigner for defining database schemas and generating instructions for administering database objects (tables, views, index, etc.). What’s more, Sybase IQ incorporates advanced SQL functions for data analysis (OLAP extensions of the ANSI SQL standard). Sybase IQ thus provides an enterprise with a fully-equipped and flexible environment for their decision support applications.

TaILOreD TO bUSIneSS InTeLLIGence envIrOnMenTSNo matter how well a database performs, it still has to work together with all the facets of a business intelligence system. It must allow an enterprise to deploy its applications speedily. In this respect, Sybase IQ is compatible with most reporting tools like Business Objects, Cognos, Microstrategy and SPSS, and indeed is optimized to work with them. As a standards-based solution, Sybase IQ also integrates easily into all eTL (extract-Transform-Load) solutions to feed information to the databases.

Beyond the actual tools, a variety of reporting techniques are used: simple reporting, ad hoc queries, multidimensional navigation, statistical analysis, data mining, etc. In all the above cases, Sybase IQ always delivers top performance. Sybase IQ is also able to reinforce an architecture based on multidimensional storage, or “cubes”, for an even better combination of performance and flexibility. In some enterprises, implementation of a cube is an insufficient response to an application’s performance constraints.

This is where Sybase IQ fits the need perfectly: it integrates with the cube technologies in relational OLAP or hybrid OLAP mode, thus reinforcing the global architecture’s robustness.

a SOLUTIOn THaT evOLveSAnother of Sybase IQ’s defining characteristics is its outstanding flexibility. Since data is indexed dynamically during loading, adding a new type of data has no impact on existing data. This allows organizations to develop their business intelligence applications very easily and without major development outlay.Furthermore, since performance increases in line with volume, Sybase IQ delivers significant savings for enterprises handling large volumes of data (1 terabyte or more) while also allowing them to process highly detailed data without constraint. When you can store five years of “historical” data on disk space that could previously only hold two years’ worth, the benefits for the user are obvious: they can design analysis queries that are more finely detailed, more relevant and cover a longer period of time.

DID yOU KnOw?Sybase IQ holds the record for the world’s largest data warehouse with one petabyte of raw data contained in 6 trillion rows of transactional data.

(Source: Guinness World Records 2008)

A breakthrough founded on standard technologies

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www.sybase.com

SUCCeSS STORIeSTestimonials from Sybase IQ customers

Prémalliance BNP Paribas Securities Services Fortis Bank Belgique BNP Paribas Factor Commissariat à L’Energie Atomique Arvato Services Brasseries Kronenbourg Eram Le Monde

www.sybase.com

Prémalliance

SecTOr

Insurance

SPOTLIGHT On PréMaLLIance

Prémalliance is a social welfare provider with four areas of activity: pensions, provident funds, health benefits and savings. In 2005, it became part of the AG2R La Mondiale Group, France’s leading interprofessional pensions and provident fund provider for salaried employees and retirees. The success of this merger was borne out in 2007, when the group achieved a turnover of 1.48 billion euro.

THe cHaLLenGe

To develop a data warehouse to support the company’s business intelligence system. IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Deployment of Sybase IQ on Windows server, Business Objects on the reporting layer.

Key beneFITS

• Substantially improved performance.

• Greater flexibility in reporting.• Faster processing thanks to

Sybase IQ’s change capture mechanisms.

• A solution that is able to evolve and meet the company’s future requirements.

Since 2003, Prémalliance has been acquiring tools to help each of its business areas enhance analysis of their results, optimize activity monitoring and improve their business strategy. Aware of the poor performance of traditional databases, Prémalliance chose Sybase IQ to develop its data warehouse. Tests showed that certain operations that take a traditional DBMS two and a half hours to complete are handled by Sybase IQ in as little as five minutes.

The first stage of the project involved consolidation of management data and implementation of an application to analyze the actual consumption of Prémalliance’s clients. The purpose of this analysis was to allow the company to optimize contribution rates.

The strategy then became clear: “We start off by analyzing mass data,” explains Julien Tavernier, Head of the Back Office department in Prémalliance’s Information Systems and Organization division, “and then we progress to the finest detail possible. In concrete terms, we analyze our activity both globally and at client level.” Completed in 2005, this initial project was used by around 150 people. At this stage, the data warehouse contained around 150 GB of data with tables exceeding 30 million rows.

Since then, new data has been added to the warehouse, and new analysis applications have been enabled. Growing data volumes have not impaired database performance. even better, specific functionality of Sybase IQ has resulted in major time savings. “In conjunction with our eTL, Sybase IQ offers functions that allow us to identify changes made between database refreshes,” notes Tavernier. “The benefit of this is that the business intelligence chains only process the changed data, which greatly increases our efficiency. We can also query and cross-reference data all we like without having to create and manage aggregates to optimize performance. One of Sybase IQ’s most valuable advantages is the absolute freedom of analysis it offers users.”

Sybase IQ is gradually becoming the control centre for the company’s data flows. “There is no doubt that Sybase IQ is the best performing business intelligence database on the market,” maintains Julien Tavernier. “It now contains all our reference data, and we regularly offload the processing of our production databases to Sybase IQ for greater efficiency, flexibility and performance.”

To improve performance, Prémalliance implemented its data warehouse with Sybase IQ, and achieved greater flexibility and efficiency in the process.

“Sybase IQ is gradually becoming our control centre for data flows.”

“One of Sybase IQ’s most valuable advantages is the absolute freedom it offers users when analyzing data.”

Julien Tavernier, Head of Back Office department in Prémalliance’s Information Systems and Organization section

www.sybase.com

BNP Paribas Securities Services

SecTeUr

Banking

SPOTLIGHT On bnP ParIbaS SecUrITIeS ServIceS

BNP Paribas Securities Services (www.securities.bnpparibas.com), a wholly-owned subsidiary of BNP Paribas, is the world’s highest rated custody bank (Standard & Poor’s AA+). With €3.6 trillion assets under custody, €744 billion assets under administration and close to 6,000 funds administered, BNP Paribas Securities Services is the eurozone’s leading securities services provider and rated number 5 in the world. BNP Paribas Securities Services has a unique multi-local model, servicing both the buy-side and sell-side with a local presence across 25 countries and global coverage of over 100 markets.

THe cHaLLenGe

To enhance the existing business intelligence infrastructure with a more flexible data warehouse to allow clients to create customized reports when it suits them.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on HP Itanium server, custom-developed Web interface based on Business Objects tools on reporting layer, Sybase RTDS detection engine for alert generation.

Key beneFITS

• Greater flexibility for clients and users when producing reports.

• Customized reporting with no limits on cross-referencing or analyzing data.

• Optimized performance.• Unparalleled service, provides

a competitive advantage.

BNP Paribas Securities Services already had a business intelligence infrastructure in place. Based on a traditional database, its flexibility and performance needed to be enhanced to meet the demands of the company’s ambitious quality of service standards. Client reporting, which used the mass reporting method, was no longer offering the level of interactivity BNP Paribas Securities Services wished to offer its clients. For this reason, the decision was taken in early 2006 to develop a new data warehouse as part of the My Reports project.

Intended to complement the organization’s existing set-up, the new data warehouse implemented with Sybase IQ uses data already contained in the historical database, and synchronizes with it using Sybase’s replication engine and via a database management system (Sybase ASe). Any change made to the original database is immediately replicated in Sybase ASe. The changed data is stored there until it is transferred to Sybase IQ. “We could have made the two databases talk to each other directly, but applying the changes only once has no impact on the target database’s performance,” explains Marc Guillard, DBA at BP2S.

“Our tests showed that Sybase IQ executes queries up to 300 times faster,” observes Marc Guillard. Nathalie Vollet, Head of IT Client Communication Solutions at BNP Paribas Securities Services, adds: “Sybase IQ’s compression and indexing technologies allow us to use a lot more historical information while still maintaining performance.”

Operational since November 2006, the My Reports solution has a custom-developed Web interface through which clients can design their own reports. They can also subscribe to receive these reports by e-mail and get alerts whenever data changes. “Our clients can compile reports when it suits them, choosing information that is relevant to them,” explains Nathalie Vollet. “This is the first such service available in our market, and there’s no doubt that it gives us a competitive edge.” Investing in technology is essential for BNP Paribas Securities Services: by driving change, it can work with its clients as they develop by maximizing opportunities and minimizing risks.

In a bid to provide its clients with unrivalled solutions for securities services, BNP Paribas Securities Services turned to Sybase IQ. The end result: greater flexibility and improved performance.

BNP Paribas Securities Services chooses Sybase IQ for its customer differentiation strategy

“Sybase IQ’s performance is nothing short of astonishing. Our tests showed that Sybase IQ executes queries up to 300 times faster.”

Marc Guillard, DBA, BNP Paribas Securities Services

www.sybase.com

Fortis Bank

SecTOr

Banking

SPOTLIGHT On FOrTIS

Active in the retail banking, asset management, private banking and merchant banking sectors, the Fortis Bank Group provides a total package of banking and insurance products and services to personal, business and institutional customers through its own channels and via other partners.

THe cHaLLenGe

To implement a data warehouse able to manage an immense amount of data at reasonable cost.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on a single quadriprocessor Pentium III 900 MHz server with 2 GB of RAM and an 800 GB hard disk on Windows.

Key beneFITS

• Reduction in TCO compared to mainframe.

• Fast implementation (by one person in half a day).

• 57% of ad hoc queries receive result in less than one second.

• Impressive data compression.• No extraneous data in query

results.

Active in the retail banking, asset management, private banking and merchant banking sectors, the Fortis Bank Group has established a strong presence in the european retail banking market, operating through a variety of distribution channels. It offers financial services to companies, institutional clients and high net worth individuals and provides integrated solutions to enterprise and entrepreneur. The Fortis Bank Group has a presence in 50 countries and is one of Belgium’s largest financial institutions. When optimizing its commercial operations, its subsidiary Fortis Bank Belgium implemented a data warehouse using Sybase IQ.

Initially, Fortis Bank Belgium planned to operate its existing business intelligence infrastructure on a mainframe. “But we discovered that this would cost more than setting up a new infrastructure on Sybase IQ,” explains Michel Van Laethem, IS project manager. “Sybase IQ can manage large volumes of data without any loss of performance and doesn’t need to be hosted on a costly mainframe. Instead, we can use a platform like Windows, which has the added bonus of being less costly in terms of storage. That is why we chose to go with Sybase IQ on Windows, and we are delighted with the huge reduction in our TCO.”

By choosing Sybase IQ, Fortis Bank Belgium was not just keen to reduce the project’s overall cost. It was also interested in the data mining aspect – the ability to detect correlations between its data. It was also won over by the database’s unique indexing technologies, which offer previously unimagined analysis capabilities. Today, Fortis users run more than 115,000 ad hoc queries per month, a figure expected to increase in the future. As for response times, 57% of queries are executed in less than a second, and only 1% take longer than three minutes - all the more remarkable when you consider that Sybase IQ manages almost 500 gigabytes of data, which would correspond to 6 terabytes in a traditional database. Sybase IQ’s compression technology is another feature much appreciated by Fortis Bank Belgium because of the way it greatly reduces storage costs.

Sybase IQ, combined with the Business Objects reporting tool, enables users to make ever more complex queries. No longer hampered by lengthy response times, bank staff consult the database much more readily, making them better informed and more proactive. For Jean-Louis Catin, internal IT expert at Fortis Bank Belgium, the infrastructure opens up new possibilities for analysis. This is good news for the bank’s future success, and Catin sums it up thus: “There’s no other technology out there capable of providing similar services for our users.”

When Fortis Bank Belgium was looking for a way to manage large volumes of data at a low cost and with no loss of performance, it chose Sybase IQ over its existing mainframe-based business intelligence infrastructure.

“Exceptional performance at an unbeatable TCO.”

“Sybase IQ is extremely easy to use. But its high level of performance is what really stands out. This is one of the strongest products I have come across in my career, which is really saying something.”

Jean-Louis catin, internal IT-expert, Fortis Bank Belgique

www.sybase.com

BNP Paribas Factor

SecTOr

Banking

SPOTLIGHT On bnP ParIbaS FacTOr

Specializing in factoring, BNP Paribas Factor is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group.It sells its products via the BNP Paribas network. The company has 280 employees and had a net banking income of almost 60 million euro in 2008.

THe cHaLLenGe

To replace the existing info centre with a more powerful database able to handle complex queries.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on IBM Power 5 server, Business Objects on the reporting layer.

LeS bénéFIceS

• High performance with ad hoc queries.

• Optimized volume.• Complete freedom for users

when inputting queries.• A highly flexible database, able

to meet future requirements without any loss of performance.

• Fast and easy to implement.• Very light administration

workload.

Factoring specialist BNP Paribas Factor is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group. It caters to businesses of all sizes, from micro companies to multinationals. Its offering ranges from flat-fee contracts to complete tailored factoring solutions. The company manages over four million invoices with a total value of 13.6 billion euro per year, or around 10% of the factoring market. BNP Paribas Factor had implemented a business intelligence solution to track of its activities at an early stage. After encountering performance issues, however, the company took advantage of a complete overhaul of its information system to create a powerful data warehouse using Sybase IQ.

“What struck us about Sybase IQ was that every item of data was a sort of index,” says Jean yovanopoulos, Director of Organization and IT at BNP Paribas Factor. “It wouldn’t be possible to reproduce this innovative technology with a traditional database.” Using Sybase’s PowerDesigner as modeling tool, the company implemented Sybase IQ in late 1999/early 2000. A staging database (Sybase ASe) is used to optimize the daily loading of data to Sybase IQ. In this way, loading data to the info centre causes no obstruction to employees using decision-support tools. The company developed other parallel environments: one is dedicated to data processing and mass reporting; the others, tailored to the company’s different business areas, enable monitoring of individual activities.

Since the migration, BNP Paribas Factor has noticed a definite improvement in performance, even though the volume of data, number of users and complexity of the queries have increased. “One of the advantages of Sybase IQ is that users no longer need to worry about the impact of their queries on the system,” explains Jean yovanopoulos. “even extremely complex queries will not affect performance. Sybase IQ not only enables users to explore and analyze data at will, it also lets them refine their analyses and fully exploit the drill-down functions available to them. In addition, we’ve noticed that nothing really fazes Sybase IQ. No matter the size of the database (currently 40 GB), the complexity of the query or the volume of data returned, the response times hardly vary at all. What’s really surprising in view of this level of performance is that Sybase IQ is about the same size as our original database.”

Implemented eight years ago, the architecture has been developed and enhanced over the years. “The advantage of this architecture is the flexibility it affords us,” comments Jean Yovanopoulos. “We can develop our current applications, give new users new reporting capabilities, and so on, without any impact on our existing set-up. And a lot of this flexibility is thanks to Sybase IQ.”

When BNP Paribas Factor overhauled its information system, it took the opportunity to adopt Sybase IQ in place of the traditional database which hosted its data warehouse. The result: vastly improved performance and greater freedom for users.

“Thanks to Sybase IQ, our users have complete freedom when inputting queries.”

“With Sybase IQ, users no longer need to worry about the impact their queries will have on the system. Even very complex queries will not affect performance.”

Jean yovanopoulos, Director of Organization and IT at BNP Paribas Factor

www.sybase.com

French Atomic energy Commission

SecTOr

Public body SPOTLIGHT On THe cea

The French Atomic energy Commission (CeA) is a major player in research, development and innovation in three key sectors: energy, information and health technologies, and defense and security. With 15,000 researchers and staff with internationally recognized expertise, its budget amounts to 3.4 billion euro.

THe cHaLLenGe

To implement a business intelligence application for speedy feedback on payroll statistics that would also meet the requirements of social welfare bodies.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ for data consolidation on biprocessor HP Windows server, Business Objects on the reporting layer and Java applications executed by IBM WebSphere.

LeS bénéFIceS

• Instantaneous information in contrast to eight hours of processing with traditional database.

• Light administration workload.• Cost-saving solution – hardware

infrastructure much reduced.

The French Atomic energy Commission (CeA) has two separate divisions: civil and military. The military division is classified as secret for defense reasons and it has its own IT system, completely isolated from the civil side. Just like any company, the CeA is accountable for every one of its activities, not just vis-à-vis government ministries but also to social welfare bodies. To comply with this, it has to consolidate data from systems that are not supposed to communicate with each other.

At a very early stage, the CeA set about consolidating the data in the two systems, with the objective of amalgamating the information needed for administrative declarations, following up expenses claim forms, and so on. When faced with a huge volume of data in a new payroll monitoring project, the CeA decided to implement Sybase IQ to optimize performance. “If you need to index 20,000 payslips each month, which equates to an SQL table with 1 billion rows, a traditional database is out of the question if you want reasonable response times for ad hoc queries,” comments Damien Poulain.

“Before this project was implemented, human resources managers had to wait over eight hours to get their statistics,” he explains. “This definitely caused many a cold sweat, because the submission deadlines to administrative bodies can’t be extended. Now, with Sybase IQ, they get their statistics instantaneously and everything is automated.” The benchmarks carried out by the CeA showed that queries which took several minutes for a traditional database to execute only took Sybase IQ two seconds. “As soon as a table reaches 100 million rows, a traditional DBMS can no longer manage freedom of access,” says Damien Poulain.

Following on from this project, which was a big hit with end users, the CeA used Sybase IQ for a new application. This also involved payslip management, but this time in the form of images associated with data. In order to meet the requirements of the French social security contribution collection agency as regards retirement, it put a system in place to extract the 20,000 monthly payslips from the eRP (SAP). These documents are copied to an SQL table containing the data and a column in binary format (image). This table will soon grow to 1 terabyte. The user can query the database via an interface developed in Java which uses the company’s WebSphere application server. With this application, the CeA gets information in real time and not after several months, as before.

With a huge volume of data to cope with, the CeA chose Sybase IQ to deliver a solution that wouldn’t keep its users waiting. Now information is delivered instantaneously instead of after hours or even months.

“There’s no way an ordinary database management system can match a specialised DBMS like Sybase IQ.”

“Sybase IQ’s performance really stood out in our benchmarks, and that is why we are using it today to help us cope with the huge volume of data we manage.”

Damien Poulain, BI Architect at the French Atomic energy Commission

www.sybase.com

Arvato Services

SecTOr

Services

SPOTLIGHT On arvaTO ServIceS

Arvato Services is part of the Bertelsmann communication group, which posted revenues of 18.8 billion euro in 2007 and has 102,500 employees working in over 50 countries. Arvato Services is part of Arvato AG, one of the group’s six corporate divisions, which has four lines of business: printed matter and document personalization (Arvato Print), production and replication of digital media (Arvato Digital Services), IT systems (Arvato Systems) and customer relationship services (Arvato Services). In the French market, Arvato Services employs 7,000 people and achieved revenues of 320 million euro in 2008.

THe cHaLLenGe

To speedily implement a high-performance ad hoc reporting solution able to handle large volumes of data for an American internet service provider.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on Linux server, Business Objects on the reporting layer, DataStage (IBM) for data loading.

Key beneFITS

• Reasonable development and administration costs.

• Response times reduced from over an hour to 20 seconds for certain queries.

• Rapid implementation (four months for the global platform).

• Cost saving achieved in client’s campaigns because of greater analysis capabilities, resulting in more accurate targeting of marketing operations.

Arvato AG is one of the Bertelsmann Group’s six corporate divisions. With a presence in 35 countries and 52,000 employees, one of the company’s four lines of business is Arvato Services, a customer relationship specialist. Tasked with handling the mailing campaigns of a major American internet service provider, Arvato Services turned to Sybase IQ in 2002 to deliver an architecture adapted to its client’s analytics requirements. “This client became aware that it had no historical data about previous mailings and responses,” explains Denis Vinson, Director of Data Management at Arvato Services. “Our client also wanted an interactive business intelligence solution to analyze the impact of its campaigns.”

It took just four months to deploy the entire solution. This is impressive considering the colossal scale of the project. The database contained details for 10 million people and 15 million rows. The task for Arvato Services was to copy the contents of the old database to Sybase IQ. According to Denis Vinson: “The speed of implementation was partly due to the technologies used by Sybase IQ, which considerably reduce the tuning needed when deploying a database.” The platform uses Business Objects on the reporting layer and DataStage to load new data into the database each month.

“We never even considered a traditional transactional database for this project,” says Denis Vinson. “From my experience as a DBA, I knew they were ill-suited to this type of task. If you want a solution that can handle any type of query, tools based on indexing are the only way forward. We carried out benchmarks with several different solutions. In the end we went with Sybase IQ for one main reason: its ease of integration.” Apart from Sybase IQ’s excellent performance when handling large volumes of data and the total freedom it offers with queries, Arvato Services was particularly impressed with the standards-based approach. “Adding to your IT system shouldn’t jeopardize what’s already there. It’s much better when you can integrate new technologies to enhance your existing system,” maintains Denis Vinson. Most similar products use specific technologies that only add complexity and sometimes aren’t compatible with the existing set-up. The great thing about Sybase IQ is that it is based on standards like SQL.”

The success of this initial project has led to a snowball effect. Arvato Services has moved on to implement a similar platform to manage an even greater volume of data (between 40,000 and 60,000 people created and/or modified in the database each day and tables with tens of millions of records). The final word goes to Denis Vinson: “The architecture has been so successful that we are now using Sybase IQ for all our CRM analytics solutions (campaign management, reporting and data mining).”

Thanks to the success of the mailing campaign management platform deployed on behalf of an American internet service provider, Arvato Services plans to offer all its clients solutions based on Sybase IQ.

“Excellent performance at a low cost.”

“Our new high-performance platform was installed very speedily and cost-effectively and won’t cost an exorbitant amount to maintain.It has been so successful that we are now using Sybase IQ for all our CRM analytics solutions.”

Denis vinson, Director of data Management at Arvato Services

www.sybase.com

Brasseries Kronenbourg

SecTOr

Agrifoods

SPOTLIGHT On braSSerIeS KrOnenbOUrG

Brasseries Kronenbourg is France’s leading brewer with revenues of 855 million euro in 2007 and a market share of almost 34%. It has built up an impressive portfolio of brands including Kronenbourg, Kanterbrau, Carlsberg, 1664 and Guinness. Dedicated to brewing excellence, innovation and collective responsibility, the company currently employs 1,500 people.

THe cHaLLenGe

To make the company’s data warehouse easier to administer.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on AIX server, Cognos on the reporting layer.

Key beneFITS

• Much lighter administration workload, so no need to add to DBA team.

• Reduction in storage costs thanks to five-fold decrease in data volume.

• Greater level of interaction in multidimensional analysis.

Brasseries Kronenbourg is France’s biggest brewer, producing over seven million hectoliters of beer annually. Its market share is 33.6%. Since the early 1990s, the company has been implementing business intelligence systems to monitor its activities and analyze all of its business areas. As the architecture grew, tasks like indexing and performance monitoring became harder, and database optimization simply became too costly. Brasseries Kronenbourg needed an alternative. It found what it was looking for in early 2000 after testing Sybase IQ. Pleased with the results of this first test, the company decided to reposition its BI architecture.

Brasseries Kronenbourg didn’t want to lose its existing business intelligence architecture, however. For that reason, the company decided to keep its traditional database and use it as a buffer between its information system and Sybase IQ. In this way, it could continue to capitalize on the procedures it had retained and developed over the years in order to load data to its warehouse. A simple replication mechanism would then copy the data to Sybase IQ. “If we had to architect a data warehouse from scratch today,” notes Christian Kraemer, “we would use Sybase IQ. We only chose this architecture so we didn’t have to redo all our data warehouse loading procedures.”

“Our objective was clear,” explains Christian Kraemer, Information System Business Partner Backoffice, Brasseries Kronenbourg. “Our DBA team was losing the battle to maintain all our databases, including the BI databases. We had to find a way of lightening their day-to-day workload. In this respect, Sybase IQ has definitely been a success because we have not needed any extra resources.” As a bonus, the company has reduced its volume of data thanks to Sybase IQ’s compression technologies and also reduced its storage needs. And finally, users are no longer constrained by the database’s schema. This means that they can make the most of their multidimensional analysis tools, giving them greater freedom in their reports.

Brasseries Kronenbourg has continued using Sybase IQ to open up new analysis possibilities, while continuing to capitalize on its valuable existing architecture. After repositioning its business intelligence architecture, the company decided to reorganize its operations. “In our current set-up, only ‘key users’ develop queries,” explains Christian Kraemer. “The good thing about Sybase IQ is that we no longer need to worry about saturating the information system with queries that prompt full table scans.”

To reduce its administration costs, Kronenbourg is using Sybase IQ instead of its traditional database for business intelligence queries. The move has not just cut costs: its users are now also much better informed.

“Sybase IQ has saved us a lot in terms of administration and storage.”

“I had one clear objective: reduce the administrative workload associated with the databases. Sybase IQ helped us achieve this goal, and we now spend less than one day a month on maintenance. In the end, we didn’t need to add to our DBA team.”

christian Kraemer, Information System Business Partner BackOffice,Brasseries Kronenbourg

www.sybase.com

eram

SecTOr

Distribution

SPOTLIGHT On eraM

With a presence in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Switzerland and Portugal, the eRAM Group is one of europe’s leading shoe and clothing distributors. Its brands include eram, France Arno, Texto, Bocage, NA! and TBS. It also owns large retail stores like GeMO (shoes and clothing), FABIO LUCCI, which it took over in 2005, TATI and CHAUSS’PRIX. In 2007, the group generated revenues of over 1.6 billion euro and employed 13,000 people.

THe cHaLLenGe

To implement a data warehouse for flexible creation of sales reports.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

Sybase IQ on AIX server, Business Objects on the reporting layer.

Key beneFITS

• A low-cost solution.• Less than one person-day of

administration per month.• Less development.• Customized needs-based

reporting with no database-imposed restrictions.

• excellent performance.

The eRAM Group decided that its mainframe-based info centers were inadequate for the reporting solution it planned to set up for its sales team. Instead, it chose Sybase IQ for its new data warehouse. “The technical possibilities of this solution grabbed us straight away,” recalls Pascal Bourget, Director of Information Systems at eRAM. And it turned out that indexing was the most convincing argument. “Since Sybase IQ indexes everything automatically, we can query any kind of data and cross-reference like never before. This gives our end users tremendous freedom and flexibility when it comes to analysis,” explains Pascal Bourget.

The architecture is now 10 years old and is used by 300 sales employees. It has never been called into question in all that time: “I’ve watched developments in the database market, and I’ve seen nothing to match Sybase IQ with its excellent performance, ease of administration and incredible TCO,” says Pascal Bourget.

Sybase IQ, and its compression technology in particular, has had a direct impact on eRAM’s administration and development costs. When the data warehouse was implemented, the group didn’t need to worry about creating aggregates. This made the application quicker to implement and also avoided rigid data structures that would have limited the sales team’s freedom to analyze data. “Managing aggregates and indexes is time-consuming for a DBA,” points out Pascal Bourget. “Our data warehouse currently contains around 1,000 tables, or 180 GB of data, with 400 million rows in the larger tables. yet our DBA spends less than one day a month on administration, or on checking that everything is ok to be more precise, because Sybase IQ is able to work perfectly well by itself.”

Sybase IQ’s technologies have benefited eRAM in other ways, too. Pascal Bourget explains the storage benefits: “We are always hearing that storage space isn’t costly and that data volume is no longer a problem. But when your storage solutions need to be as secure and reliable as ours, that really isn’t the case. Storage can still be expensive, and if your database can reduce the volume of data, so much the better. When added to the savings in development and administration costs, Sybase IQ’s compression technology gives this database one of the lowest TCOs in the market.”

Impressed with Sybase IQ’s compression and indexing technologies, the eRAM Group implemented a data warehouse for its sales team ten years ago. It is now reaping the rewards of an unbeatable return on investment.

“The most cost-effective database on the market.”

“I’ve watched developments in the database market and I’ve seen nothing to match Sybase IQ in terms of performance, administration and TCO.”

Pascal bourget, Director of Information Systems at eRAM

www.sybase.com

Le Monde

SecTOr

Press

SPOTLIGHT On Le MOnDe

Le Monde is a French press group. Its subsidiaries are Le Monde Partenaires et Associés (LMPA), Télérama SA, Malesherbes Publications, Les Publications Historiques, Sper, Fleurus Presse and Éditions de l’etoile.

THe cHaLLenGe

To replace the existing transactional engine with a database capable of delivering improved performance and more freedom to analyze data.

IMPLeMenTaTIOn

SUN server on Solaris.

Key beneFITS

• Quicker response times with queries returned in just 5 minutes instead of the previous 15 to 20 minutes.

• More freedom to analyze data with certain cross-referencing operations enabled for the first time.

• Better audience targeting and reduction in campaign running costs.

The French press group Le Monde’s most notable publication is the daily Le Monde. Its first edition was published in 1944 and it is considered the French newspaper of record. Available in over 120 countries and with a circulation in excess of 400,000, it reaches almost two million readers daily. Around thirty other titles, magazines and dailies come under the Le Monde banner. These are either directly controlled by the group or by its subsidiaries. With such an abundance of publications, the company wanted to get an overview of all its subscriptions. A tricky enough task since the data was scattered across many different information systems. This caused the group to consider a solution based on Sybase IQ in 2002.

“We had recommended Sybase IQ to our service provider,” explains Christophe Clerc, Head of Research and Development, and Thierry Sicre, Client Database Administrator. We didn’t think that a transactional engine could meet our needs. We had a lot of data to manage and we felt that we could go a lot further with Sybase IQ, especially with queries, because of the indexing system.” All the same, the Group initially implemented a traditional transactional engine. Huge performance issues cropped up, however, and the group decided to revert to its original idea in 2006. The decision to switch to Sybase IQ was sealed when tests on a full-scale model produced very promising results.

“There was no comparison,” says Thierry Sicre. “The benefits were immediate and significant.For example, on the transactional engine response times varied from 15 to 20 minutes for complex queries, whereas Sybase IQ only took 5 minutes.” Another huge benefit is greater freedom when analyzing data. The old system failed to deliver responses for some queries because of a lack of indexing. “It was impossible to cross-reference certain data,” confirms Christophe Clerc. “Technological constraints are no longer holding us back, and our analysis results have vastly improved.”

Up and running in just a few months, the new architecture gives the group a per-household view of its entire subscriber base. It can now filter analyses by title, social criteria, etc. “This has definitely become a critical application for our group, since the objective is bigger and better sales,” explains Thierry Sicre. “We can now target our audience more accurately, and in the process reduce the cost of marketing campaigns and increase our efficiency.”

When poor performance became a real headache for the Le Monde Group, it asked its service provider to look into migrating its data to Sybase IQ to reduce response times and achieve greater freedom of analysis.

“A traditional engine just wouldn’t give us the same analysis capabilities.”

“Technological constraints are no longer holding us back, and our analysis results have vastly improved.”

christophe clerc, Head of Research and Development, Le Monde

Sybase Professional Services: totally dedicated to clients and systems integrators

Drawing on their expertise and vast knowledge of the solution, the consultants of Sybase Professional Services play a key role in successful implementation of a Sybase IQ project. These data management experts advise customers every step of the way, from loading data to the database right through to reporting. Our consultants will tell clients and systems integrators everything they need to know about modeling, defining the best indexing policy and, of course, optimizing performance.

The Sybase Professional Services teams provide tailored services as well as turnkey solutions known as “QuickStart packages”. Based on best practice, these packages speed up the introduction of a new Sybase IQ configuration or optimize an existing configuration’s performance. As well as consulting, Sybase Professional Services also offers multi-level training.The training courses are designed for developers and administrators, and guarantee that your enterprise will have the solution up and running quickly and efficiently. Just what you need to get the best possible return on your investment.

Please contact Sybase directly for the details of your nearest Sybase IQ systems integrator.

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