Xpace Information

The core of Xpace's technology has evolved from products written by Jim Kearney and Paul Sepe over the past twenty years. Ten years ago, Archi-Tech Systems, a provider of software to manage pharmaceutical marketing research data, contracted Paul to write a database back-end for the larger (several gigabyte) data sets it was seeing. This engine, named InPress, has been behind Archi-Tech's product line, including DART, now in its fourth generation, and has penetrated mid-sized pharmaceutical firms quite pervasively. Archi-Tech's products replace conventional OLAP solutions, which usually depend on an SQL-based data warehouse (Oracle or MS-SQL), from which is exported data to make a hypercube, which provides data for analysis. Knowing its market, Archi-Tech trades some flexibility for performance, and, using InPress, builds the entire warehouse into a compact, fast, completely indexed database. Full access to their data allows Archi-Tech's customers to examine relationships among them at the speed of thought; there is never a need to rebuild a hypercube to include a new field. A typical InPress database has tens of thousands of indexes; some have hundreds of thousands. Many of these indexes are of data synthesized-but not stored -in the database. Searching and sorting usually take less than a second, compared to hours or days with the systems it has replaced. Even with all these indexes, an InPress database takes less than one-eighth the space of an MS-SQL database with just one index.