Purpose

Production databases are usually not suited to supply management with the tools and information to make buisiness decisions. There is too much detail on one side and no organization of the data for specific queries that make it easy and fast to get the relevant query results. Also many production environments can not afford to be bogged down with intensive queries.

These are the reasons why data warehouses gain more and more acceptance as a necessary business tool. One problem with Multi-value databases was always the export of the data into other data systems. Often elaborate programs were created to export the data in flat files, either fixed length or delimited. These programs are expensive to maintain and slow in execution.

Using ODBC to expose the Multi-value data and using a data transport mechanism like Microsoft's Data Traqnsformation Service (DTS) is a great strategy to simplify and streamline this process.

I have been working with Multi-value ODBC since 1996 and I successfully developed a data transport mechanism for LA Care, the country's largest Medicare HMO.