Company:Red Brick Systems
| Industry | Computer software |
|---|---|
| Fate | Purchased by Informix Corporation |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Founder | Ralph Kimball |
| Defunct | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Los Gatos, California |
| Products | Red Brick Warehouse |
Red Brick Systems, Inc. was a provider of relational database products and services for data warehouse applications headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Ralph Kimball founded the company in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992.
Red Brick was specialized in software products used for fast, accurate and confident business decision-making on large client/server databases.[1]
In April 1997, the company made an unexpected operating loss of $6.7m, down from an operating profit of $0.2m in first-quarter 1996, with a total net loss for the quarter of $6.4m versus a net income of $0.4m for the same period last year.[2]
In 1998 Informix Corporation signed an agreement to buy Red Brick Systems for about $35 million in stock, which cost just $12.5 million because Red Brick was sitting on $22.5 million in cash and securities.[3] Under the terms of the deal, Informix exchanged each share of Red Brick common stock for 0.6 shares of Informix common stock.[4] After the acquisition of Informix by IBM, they continued to support Red Brick Warehouse until 2017, when version 6.3 was discontinued.[5]
Products
Red Brick Warehouse
| Developer(s) | Red Brick Systems, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 6.3[6]
/ April 13, 2004 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform UNIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows (NT thru Server 2003), AIX, HP-UX (both 32 and 64 bit for all platforms) |
| Type | RDBMS |
| License | Proprietary |
Red Brick's flagship product was Red Brick Warehouse, a commercial Relational Database Management System designed specifically for query, decision support, and data warehouse applications. It was a software-only system providing ANSI SQL support in an open client/server environment.
It was positioned for star schema data marts where referential integrity is enforced and which were experiencing poor data loading performance, poor detail-level query performance, or expensive hardware upgrades to achieve acceptable performance. Their claim to fame was the use of bit-map Indexes in order to achieve performance gains that amounted to almost 10 times that of other Database vendors at that time.
Red Brick Warehouse included several parallel algorithms designed to match I/O concurrency and processor concurrency to the needs of large unit-of-work query and data loading requests. Each table was managed by a Parallel Table Server subsystem, and table data was segmented by value or hash to dozens or hundreds of physical disk drives. Table server subsystems used a process-per-disk architecture to achieve high I/O concurrency, as well as buffering and scheduling to minimize seeks and to maximize I/O transfer rates. It also used a proprietary multi-dimensional join index to quickly perform single-pass joins of 2 to 10 tables.[7]
Known Versions:
- 5.0
- 5.1
- 6.0
- 6.1
- 6.2
- 6.3
Version 5.0 was released by Red Bricks Systems, while version 5.1 was released after the acquisition by Informix. All 6.x releases were done under IBM.
Features highlighted by IBM on version 6.3:
- Provides efficient processing of large data sets and delivers outstanding performance for the most complex business solutions
- Handles thousands of concurrent SQL queries, hundreds of concurrent users and terabytes of data
- Provides an ideal foundation for any third-party decision support solution
- Reduces deployment time and hardware and maintenance costs
- Is designed to be a "hands off" database engine
As of v6.3, the product was offered in two editions: Red Brick Warehouse Enterprise Edition and Red Brick Warehouse Workgroup Edition.[8]
References
- ↑ "Red Brick Systems". Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/REDB:US#xj4y7vzkg.
- ↑ "RED BRICK: THE HOOTIE OF DATA WAREHOUSE". Tech Monitor. 1997-04-18. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/red_brick_the_hootie_of_data_warehouse_1.
- ↑ "Informix Buys Red Brick in Warehousing Consolidation". ESJ. 1998-11-18. https://esj.com/articles/1998/11/18/informix-buys-red-brick-in-warehousing-consolidation.aspx?m=1.
- ↑ "Informix to buy Red Brick Systems". CNET. 2002-01-02. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/informix-to-buy-red-brick-systems/.
- ↑ "Software withdrawal and support discontinuance: IBM DB2 selected products". 2016-04-12. https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/897/ENUS916-003/index.html.
- ↑ "IBM Red Brick Warehouse V6.30". https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_sm/8/897/ENUS5724-C18/index.html&request_locale=en.
- ↑ Fernandez, Phillip M.. "Red Brick Warehouse: A Read-Mostly RDBMS for Open SMP Platforms". Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. SIGMOD '94 (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: Association for Computing Machinery): 492. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191843.191947.
- ↑ "IBM Red Brick Warehouse". IBM. 2015-12-11. http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/redbrick/.
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