What is Sequel Data Warehouse?

I've been asked many times over the years to provide a brief description of Sequel Data Warehouse. 

What I find extremely difficult (especially when I'm limited to 100 words or so) is what to put in and what to leave out.

The product has grown immensely over almost two decades, two complete re-writes, and seven major releases, evolving and extending to meet new business requirements and to take advantage of new technologies.

But First, Let Me Tell You What Sequel Data Warehouse Is NOT

Sequel Data Warehouse is NOT a reporting/analytics tool. It does not build reports, charts and dashboards. (That's what Sequel Data Access does.)

There are literally dozens of such tools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Most of these reporting/analytics tool vendors will tell you (sometimes they need a little pushing) that their tool works best when coupled with a well-designed, integrated data warehouse.  

And that's where Sequel Data Warehouse comes in. 

Sequel Data Warehouse customers can build whatever data structures they need and can choose the front end tools (often more than one is required) that work best for them.

So What is Sequel Data Warehouse?

Sequel Data Warehouse is an advanced, fully integrated, visual development environment. It's primarily designed to define, build, load, and manage data warehouses, data marts and/or operational data stores (ODS) for use in business intelligence applications. Similar tools are often referred to as Extract,Transform, Load (ETL) tools. 

Sequel Data Warehouse also includes an extensive management layer. This layer monitors and controls the development and execution of these ETL processes. The goal is to ensure a very high degree of data integrity in a rapid development environment. 

So, Sequel Data Warehouse is a fully integrated development and deployment environment for ETLM applications. (We also call this "Data Engineering.")

What Else Can Sequel Data Warehouse Do?

It is also important to realize that Sequel Data Warehouse is not just suitable for data warehousing applications. (Although it was specifically designed for and excels at that task.)

Because it can basically do anything in relation to selecting, manipulating, validating, and moving data of all types, it has many other uses.

Some of our customers use Sequel Data Warehouse to undertake data conversion projects when migrating from one software package to another. They also use it to move and integrate data between applications that aren't currently integrated. This might be to update last payment date onto the customer master file whenever a payment is made. Or it might be to provide data such as price lists or inventory updates to suppliers and customers (and vice versa).

Why Sequel Data Warehouse is a Must Today

There are ever-increasing requirements to supply data and information about your business to government and regulatory agencies.

This is an area that often redirects valuable development resources away from core business applications. These and many other requirements can be easily handled by Sequel Data Warehouse—often within minutes, hours or days as opposed to days, weeks, or months.

Sequel Data Warehouse provides full lifecycle facilities to develop, test, deploy and then change applications, as well as audits and monitors the results so users can be confident in the integrity of the data delivered. And, this is done in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take to develop, test, and deploy such applications using traditional methods. (At least, without involving an experienced programmer...)

Sequel Data Warehouse is designed to fully support a rapid and iterative development environment.

Here's how. Sequel Data Warehouse creates and is driven by an "active" metadata repository, defined by the data warehouse development team using an easy to use, integrated, visual development environment. This active metadata is subsequently used to automatically generate highly efficient native program code that creates, executes, controls, and monitors data engineering applications.

The active metadata also provides:

• Up-to-date definitions of the source and target data
• Rules for transformation of data from sources to targets
• Processing audits and controls to ensure data integrity

By definition, the active metadata (the data about the data) in Sequel Data Warehouse is therefore always in sync with the data itself, something not always true of other tools and often a major cause of frustrating errors and inaccurate or incorrect data.

Get Started with Sequel Data Warehouse

Sequel Data Warehouse takes even the most complex requirements and reduces them to simpler, fully documented processes. And you'll be able to upgrade and enhance them if and when the need arises.

Because it works natively on IBM i, it also takes full advantage of all the new IBM for i technologies. It scales to massive size (many, many terabytes) and super fast load rates (billions of rows per hour on larger systems) if required.

You will never have to move your data warehouse off IBM i no matter how large your transactions volumes grow or how complex your requirements become.

Get your first taste of Sequel Data Warehouse by watching a 4-minute demonstration. 

So you can be assured no matter what happens with respect to your organization's data requirements, Sequel Data Warehouse will be able to handle it quickly, accurately and economically.