High Performance, High Capacity, Small Footprint System

Performance is the Achilles heel of data warehouse applications. To be of practical interest, the data warehouse must contain enough dimensions with enough granularity to resolve the issues. The size however of a multi-dimensional data warehouse is directly related to the number of cells, not the number of source records; even the most innocent looking designs can be of overwhelming size. Designs with cells on the order of magnitude 12 (1,000 billion cells) are common. For many data warehouses, the storage scheme breaks down and processing requirements demand high-end dedicated servers to handle real world problems.

Highlander delivers high performance and high capacity in the small footprint of a PC based product. Highlander constructs a multi-dimensional database, then resolves all queries through the database to achieve high performance. All processing is done on the PC platform, without the aid of high-end dedicated servers. Query retrieval times depend of course on many factors, however for the typical Highlander database, they fall under a minute. Highlander databases are also remarkably compact. Databases with order-of-magnitude 12 cell counts routinely consume less than 50 MB of disk space. This unequaled performance qualifies Highlander as the ideal desktop OLAP and data mart system.