Databases and Data Warehouses

With Pizza being America’s second favorite fast food Dominos needs a key way recording all of its findings. Domino's wanted to understand delivery areas by geocoding and mapping the households that bought Domino's pizza and non-pizza items. Domino's selected Qualitative Marketing Software Inc., (QMSoft) and its Centrus GeoStan solution--an embeddable address hygiene and geocoding technology--in July 1996. GeoStan provided Domino's with a solution that in a single pass can parse each record, fix poorly formatted or misspelled address elements, correct ZIP codes and add ZIP+4. What's more, it appends records with carrier route, delivery point bar codes (DPBC), line of travel (LOT) codes, and check digits; creates Postal Form 3553; and assigns address-level and ZIP+4 latitude/longitude coordinates, block group, MSA, census block, census tract and other geographic information. Domino's is now able to locate prospects for target, relationship and micro marketing; evaluate existing markets; create new sales territories; identify streets, neighborhoods or entire cities by level of penetration; refine direct mail lists and reduce postage; and perform point-in-polygon and radial analyses--all of which helped in the recent successes of its direct marketing campaigns.

Implementation on Domino's Informix 7.24 database, using QMSoft's 32-bit software in a batch mode, was immediate.A “Database” is a collection of information that you organize and access according to the logical structure of that information.

(Information Systems Essentials, 3rd Edition. McGraw-Hill Create 84).The only additional requirement that needed to be met before GeoStan could be put into action was for an interface to be written so that GeoStan could call from Domino's 4GL programs, which the pizza company used along with Perl language prior to developing its data warehouse. That project took a couple of months, with help from a local 4GL C programmer. Benchmarking GeoStan was not a priority. Domino's was primarily looking for functionality; response time was not that essential.

Yet, it has proven to be fast enough to handle the loading and cleansing of 12 million customer names in a 120GB data warehouse, which was built using an IBM RS/6000 hardware platform and IBM AIX 4.1 operating system on an Ethernet and TCP/IP network.A “data warehouse” is, in fact, a special form of a database that contains information gathered from operational databases for the purpose of supporting decision-making tasks.(Information Systems Essentials, 3rd Edition. McGraw-Hill Create 82).” What's more, Domino's implemented Cognos' PowerPlay software for its data warehouse to handle query and reporting as well as data mining, and Informix software to store data and manage the warehouse. The benefits of utilizing this setup are simple: it's flexible, it's top of the line and its common use throughout a number of industries has produced a lot of programmers who know how to work with it.