4-page Case Study - Posted 9/24/2007

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Danske Supermarket

Danish Supermarket Group Manages 10 Terabytes of Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005

With more than 1,000 stores, Danish Supermarket group is one of Denmark’s largest retailers. To help keep up with customer needs, the company manages more than 10 terabytes of business intelligence data on the Microsoft Application Platform. To enhance its analytics, Danish Supermarket recently upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Analysis Services for its 600 gigabytes of multidimensional cubes. The company has an additional 9 terabytes of data in its relational data warehouse, which has also been upgraded from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). All of the BI data is hosted on an HP Integrity server computer with 8 Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors. Moving to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services has given the company’s 700 analysts the ability to do product-level analytics of the more than 1 million products carried by the stores.

Situation

The Danish Supermarket group is one of the largest retailers in Denmark, generating 2006 revenues of U.S.$9.5 billion. The company employs more than 41,000 employees in its six chains of stores totaling more than 1,000 outlets serving customers in Denmark and (through its Netto chain) other countries including Poland, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

A few years ago Danish Supermarket moved its data warehouse infrastructure to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database running on the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system. The company was especially interested in using SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services to create multidimensional data cubes to support faster analytics. Analysis Services proved popular with the company’s analysts who use multidimensional cubes to help guide business decisions including optimal product stocking levels.

As the company’s analytical needs grew — the stores of the Danish Supermarket group handle more than one million different products — its analysts sought even greater analytical power and performance.

Solution

Working with Platon, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Danish Supermarket upgraded its Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to manage its multidimensional cubes for analytics. The company’s 600 gigabytes of multidimensional data makes it one of the world’s largest SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services deployments.

The decision to upgrade to SQL Server 2005 came after the company visited a Microsoft performance lab in Redmond, Washington to test its own data using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.

Danish Supermarket also has a 9 terabyte BI data warehouse, which was recently upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

We were drawn to SQL Server 2005 because of improvements in Analysis Services, but we’ve found plenty of other ways in which to benefit from upgrading Kim Nissen IT&S System Development Manager Danske Supermaket

The data warehouse and multidimensional cubes are hosted on an HP Integrity server computer with 8 Intel Dual-Core Itanium processors and 64 gigabytes (GB) of RAM. Storage is on an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array .

Danish Supermarket uses a multi-tier BI architecture that includes:

-ETL Tier. Data from more than 1,000 point of sale (POS) systems provide exacting sales data from the company’s stores. POS data, along with information feeds from demographic sources is prepared for the data warehouse relational database using SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services to manage extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. After upgrading the data warehouse to SQL Server 2005, the company will use SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to perform ETL.
-Data Warehouse Tier. The data warehouse includes 9 terabytes of relational information hosted on a single instance of SQL Server. The largest table holds more than 500 million rows of data in total, and is partitioned into monthly blocks.
-Analytics Tier. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is used to organize information from the data warehouse into multidimensional cubes with pre-calculated aggregation data to provide rapid answers to complex analytical queries. Danish Supermarket has everything in only two multidimensional data cubes, each with eight to 10 dimensions. The largest cube contains more than 600 GB of data.
-Analytics Interface. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner TARGIT provides a powerful user interface for analytics with its TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite.

Benefits

Upgrading its 9-terabyte relational data warehouse and its 600 gigabytes of multidimensional cube data gives Danish Supermarket a number of benefits including enhanced analytics, better view of the business, enterprise-grade solution, easier database management, and enhanced performance.

Enhanced Analytics
Upgrading to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services has given Danish Supermarket the power they need for analyzing usage patterns, pricing, and inventory for the more than 1 million different products carried by its stores.

“Our previous system worked well but it wasn’t until upgrading to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services that we were able to perform the analytics we needed to do on the product level,” says Kim Nissen, IT&S System Development Manager, at Danish Supermarket. “Our purchasers and analysts now have access to the data they need from more than 12 billion rows of relational data feeding into our multidimensional cubes. The combination of Analysis Services 2005 with our TARGIT BI solution is enabling our people to perform analytics on the product level that simply weren’t possible before.  This is important to us because we use our product analytics to better meet the needs of our customers in the store.”

Better View of the Business
The Microsoft Application Platform is helping Danish Supermarket gain a better view of its business. The 9 terabytes of relational data and the additional 600 gigabytes of multidimensional cube data managed by Analysis Services and explored using the TARGIT front end, helps the multinational retailer provide a great experience for its customers.

“For Danish Supermarket group it is of crucial importance that our buyers can always have an overview of both sales and purchases,” says Nissen. “We need to be able to see what is happening today, and we need the ability to accurately predict what our customer needs will be in the future. SQL Server and our TARGIT BI Suite are giving us the view into the data we need.”

Enterprise-Grade Solution
Always looking toward the future, Danish Supermarket needed to deploy its BI solution on a platform that was enterprise-grade and highly scalable.

“Moving to SQL Server 2005 deployed on our HP Integrity with Itanium processors is part of a huge consolidation project across our Windows systems,” says Kurt Roland Andreassen, IT&S Applications manager at Danish Supermarket, who is responsible for all IT applications in the Danish Supermarket group. “Instead of developing specific BI solutions on our own, as we did in the past, we are now choosing the optimal standard BI components.”

The combination of Analysis Services 2005 with our TARGIT BI solution is enabling our people to perform analytics on the product level that simply weren’t possible before Kim Nissen IT&S System Development Manager Danske Supermarket

“We are committed to standardizing our system architecture in a way that best supports our future development,” Andreassen says. “We don't want to spend resources developing functionality already available in standard systems. We experienced the same in the ERP industry where standard functionality often exceeds custom possibilities. We are very pleased with our standard TARGIT interface, and we know we have the right foundation with our Microsoft BI Platform running on the 64-bit Itanium processors.”

Easier Database Management
Danish Supermarket is looking forward to taking advantage of new features in SQL Server 2005, including Online Indexing, Table Partitioning, and Dynamic Management Views (DMVs).

“We were drawn to SQL Server 2005 because of improvements in Analysis Services, but we’ve found plenty of other ways in which to benefit from upgrading,” says Nissen. “When dealing with more than 10 billion rows of information, we can certainly see value in Table Partitioning, which gives us the ability to treat multiple tables as a single entity, and Online Indexing which will enable us to perform database maintenance without having to schedule downtime.”

DMV Reports give DBAs a greater transparency across multiple aspects of database health and performance. SQL Server 2005 includes over 70 DMV Reports for comprehensive views of performance data and recommendations for improving database performance.

“We have 700 analysts running recurring and ad hoc queries across more than 600 gigabytes of multidimensional data,” says Andreassen. “We like the fact that DMV Reports greatly simplify the process of query tuning.”

Enhanced Performance
Danish Supermarket has enjoyed enhanced performance from its new software and hardware infrastructure.

“Together with the performance improvements we demonstrated in the Redmond customer lab we realized that the perfect fit for SQL Server 2005 was the new high performance processor Intel Itanium, Montecito,” says Nissen.

The yearly BI data growth in Danish Supermarket is about 30 percent , so a scalability strategy for both server software and hardware is crucial for the future usage of the BI platform.

“The SQL Server 2005 has plenty of scalability support for us,” says Nissen. “Our best choice of scalable Windows hardware platform was the HP Integrity series which we trust to serve our growing BI solution. The Intel Itanium based HP servers also meets our expectations regarding support agreement possibilities and all at a reasonable price.”

 
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of Windows Server System, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.

For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to:
www.microsoft.com/sqlserver  

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Platon products and services, call +45 7028 3000 or visit the Web site at: www.platon.net

For more information about TARGIT products and services, call +45 96 23 19 00, or visit the Web site at: www.TARGIT.com

For more information about Intel products and services, visit the Web site at: www.intel.com

For more information about Danish Supermarket products and services, visit the Web site at: www.dsg.dk

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published August 2007