Sybase is touting new full text search and query federation capabilities in the latest release of its Sybase IQ database.
Building on last year’s update, in Sybase IQ 15.2 the company has built in the ability to extract information currently locked in e-mail, file systems and other unstructured formats in a bid to improve analytics. Users can retrieve information by searching for multiple or alternative words and phrases and scoring the frequency with which a term occurs within a document.
According to a recent Forrester Research report, as much as 70 percent of the information in today’s organizations is unstructured data.
“What we’ve been finding over the past couple of years is that customers have really been wanting to extend the reach of their analytic systems in a couple of ways, one of which is that they have been wanting to integrate text better with their analytics processes – particularly text with e-mail…(and) other types of data that often travels with structured information,” said Tom Traubitz, Director of Sybase IQ Product Marketing. “The second is they have been wanting to be able to increasingly integrate analytics systems into more real-time…operations,” he added.
To that second point, Sybase has added support for federated analytics queries and real-time loading. Query federation allows users to access information previously unavailable due to data movement or restrictions without it having to be moved or copied to a data warehouse, according to Sybase.
“What it allows the analytics system to do is look at information that is in other computers via ODBC (open database connectivity) or other interfaces,” Traubitz said.
Accompanying this, he added, are tighter role-based access controls that allow administrators to define access privileges by the role of the user and apply that several users.
Other enhancements include extended support for Web 2.0 development languages such as PERL and Python.
“Sybase IQ is best known for its extreme performance, allowing decision-makers to analyze business trends, predict outcomes, and revise strategies, often in a matter of seconds,” Joydeep Das, Director of Product Management, Data Warehousing and Analytics at Sybase, said in a statement. “With Sybase IQ 15.2, enterprises are now able to analyze previously untapped sources of information, such as web content and email, to deliver smarter answers across structured and unstructured data.”