News

CopperEye Looks into a New Repository

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• August 17, 2005

CopperEye introduced a business event repository that allows companies to store hundreds of terabytes of data indefinitely and retrieve it when necessary.

CopperEye Greenwich works as a remote database server connecting to other relational databases, such as Oracle and DB2, and business intelligence tools, such as Cognos and Business Objects. The software finds structured flat files on the underlying file system, parsing, indexing and presenting that information over ODBC. Greenwich provides a direct access to data via a standard SQL query.

Greenwich’s indexing service discovers new data files when they appear in the target file directories, parses those files based on predefined file structures, then creates the required indexes. A storage admin can add file definitions and change them when file formats and visibility requirements are altered. The service indexes fields within each record, logging the field value, file identity and record offset so the contents are directly retrieved in a single disk I/O.

The service also supports multiple file parsing conventions, including ASCII and binary file formats, fixed and variable format records, and fixed, variable and delimited fields.

The querying service receives queries in SQL format through ODBC, retrieving records from the underlying files using the file identities and record offsets returned by each index. Records and files collected from a query are presented as rows and columns in a relational view over ODBC. A record has multiple views, and each view is defined to see all fields or subsets of the fields in each record. Multiple record types can be changed into a single view.

Greenwich typically requires less than 200 MB of memory, and the executable code takes less than 16 MB of disk space. It is available on Linux and tier-one Unix platforms. Pricing is determined by the number of rows of data the administrator wishes to manage.