New release of SAS® Enterprise ETL Server outperforms benchmark by more than 60 percent

Recent benchmarking numbers prove enterprise-class ETL performance of SAS®9

21 March 2005 -  SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that it has completed benchmarking tests on its newest version of the SAS^® Enterprise ETL Server package. The results of this testing revealed SAS Enterprise ETL Server can outperform other ETL tools by more than 60 percent in throughput testing. SAS' achievement is significant because businesses today are dealing with ever-increasing amounts of data that must be processed in less time. Until now, too many businesses have had to choose between sacrificing analytic capabilities or accelerating ETL performance.

"Before SAS, we depended on very large and complex data transfer processes," said Luc Billion, ICT manager of Belgium's Federal Public Service Public Health department. "But SAS ETL has given us a more transparent, organised and manageable data warehouse. With SAS ETL, we now possess the power to move and transfer data in a very efficient, more flexible and faster way."

Using a Sun Microsystems 72 CPU Sun Fire^TM 15K server running the Solaris^TM 10 operating system and leveraging the Sun StorEdge^TM 9980 system, SAS demonstrated the world-class performance of SAS Enterprise ETL Server through the completion of a 2.2 terabyte (trillion bytes) throughput in less than 90 minutes, representing over 21 GB/Hour/CPU - a world record based on published benchmarks.

"It is critical that businesses have a solid data integration platform in place to handle the increasing amounts of data that must be regularly loaded into their warehouses," said Don Hatcher, vice president of the SAS Enterprise Excellence Center. "The performance of SAS' ETL offering more than adequately addresses current needs and is built to handle future opportunities. ETL performance is a high priority due to the increasingly global nature of today's enterprises."

While performance is one key aspect of having a successful ETL cycle, flexibility and adaptability are also critical. A recent Forrester* report by Phillip Russom highlighted that hand coding is still a "ubiquitous task" in ETL development, with more than 90 percent of users surveyed reporting that hand-coded routines are still part of their ETL solutions. "All ETL products are not created equal, particularly in the strength and flexibility of data transformations," said Bill Prentice, SAS technology strategist. "The SAS Enterprise ETL Server not only simplifies this process, but we also have the broadest range of transformations to meet our customers' unique needs and significantly reduce the need for hand coding and other complex tasks. SAS not only makes it easy for ETL developers to do their job, but we also make sure that they can do so efficiently - giving them the ability to focus on other value-added tasks."

SAS Enterprise ETL Server is an integral part of the SAS^®9 Intelligence Platform (http://www.sas.com/technologies/architecture/index.html), which is the foundation of the SAS^®9 family of technologies and solutions. Details on the newest version of the SAS Enterprise ETL Server can be found at http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/022805/news1.html, with more information about the package available at http://www.sas.com/technologies/dw/entetlserver/index.html.

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