_____________________________________________________________ Solution Case Study Visibility & Awareness

Visibility and Awareness of Information Use Leads to Improved Performance and Efficiencies   Corporate Express, a international office products distributor, built a 1 TB data warehouse to serve as its strategic platform for analysis of order and inventory data. While they were migrating legacy data and concurrently doubling the size of the user community, they called on Teleran to help reduce the costs associated with supporting and maintaining this system over time.   Corporate Express Challenge   A service level agreement required the data warehouse to be up and running by 7:00 a.m., Monday through Friday. However, nightly data loads of more than 200 tables had "hit a performance wall". Although they began at 12:30 a.m., the load typically wasn’t finished until after 8:30 a.m., more than an hour after the required start time. This interfered with user access, reduced business productivity, and generated an increase in help-desk calls.   Teleran Solution   Corporate Express used iSight to evaluate whether the data that was loaded every night was actually being used by the business. As a result of this evaluation of users’ information access patterns, IT identified numerous ways to reduce the load volume. Nightly load-time was cut by 25% and the data warehouse is now online daily before 7:00 am, in accordance with the company’s service level agreement, enabling users to meet their business objectives.     See how DBAs reduce load times & helpdesk calls   iSight revealed that more than one-third of tables being loaded every night had not been accessed during the past three  months. The unused tables were rescheduled to a monthly load cycle and the nightly load was thereby reduced by 600 million rows. Of the tables that remained, most had columns that had not been used in the past three months. Removal of these unused columns further reduced the load time. Indexes are designed to speed query processing, but take a relatively long time to load. iSight’s analysis of index use revealed that 20% of all indexes had not been used in the past three months and could therefore be dropped, additionally reducing the nightly load time.     See how a data warehouse VP reduced costs     Back to top   *All company names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.