How important is the integration of customer communication channels to customer management?

Does L&M Technologies really have the world's fastest database? The company claims that its DataPulse DB Engine on an Intel platform is capable of analyzing billions of records and table-join queries in real time. In early August, L&M announced its database challenge, asking any organization with at least one hundred million records to go up against them using any other open systems database product, on any size computer platform. If the DataPulse DB Engine doesn't prove to be at least 100 times faster than the challenger's system, L&M Technologies will give the winner a $100,000 prize or donate the money to its charity of choice. If the competition loses, it has to buy the minimum product set (no price value given); L&M will still donate $100,000 to United Way.

Andrew Benners, a marketing spokesperson for L&M, explains that the database was designed as a decision support management system as opposed to a transactional support system. "Large amounts of any kind of data, transactional or customer, can be loaded in the system in one place and then analyzed in real time," he says. The database supports its own descriptive statistics and is compatible with other statistical tools. It can perform 30 table joins in 27 seconds. According to L&M, queries of one dimension with 14 permutations take up to 11 minutes on Microsoft's OLAP Services 7.0, but 18 seconds or less on L&M's DataPulse 8.0.
"The database was designed for large organizations such as insurance companies, banks and brokerage firms," Benners says. "However we recently discovered that it is also ideal for e-commerce organizations, which are collecting a lot of information about people in a short amount of time."

L&M is confident that its database is the only one that can perform, in real time, cascade counts, descriptive statistics and multidimensional analyses against the same detail data without the help of summarized data, star-schemas or cubes. Now it just needs a challenger to prove itself. At the time this issue went to press, L&M's challenge had been unanswered. If you're up to the challenge, contact Andrew Benners at abenners@lmlabs.com .