Is it able to quickly answer a series of questions, based on the answer to the previous answer?

Is it able to interface to popular databases and text files for loading of data?

Is it able to provide support for ad-hoc queries and reports with average of not more than 2 seconds response time

Is Speedminer able to provide improved access of data from many databases within the organization?
Yes, Speedminer consolidates information from various data source, various platform and format to form the Operation Data Store (ODS). ODS represent the single version of truth for the entire organization and all reports and analysis can be easily retrieved from here using very user friendly tools like Speed Analyzer and Speed Visualizer.

Does it support both strategic and tactical or 'active' decision support?
Yes, Speedminer supports strategic analysis as well as tactical analysis

Is it able to support real time or near real time Data Warehouse?
With the delta load, the data warehouse can be updated concurrently with the load and thus achieve real time or near real time data warehouse.

Will user be able to use the Data Warehouse system while ETL job is in process?
As records are inserted or updated, each refresh may update with latest available data.

Is the OLAP database able to scale up to Penta Byte (1024 Giga Bytes) of data?
Yes, Speedminer is able to support up to penta bytes of data. Selayang Hospital which has source data of more than 380 GB, loaded into Speedminer server with the specifications of Pentium Xeon 3.0 Dual Processors, 2 GB RAM, 10K rpm 850 GB Hard disk.

Is it able to support pictures and attach pictures to records?
Yes, Speedminer supports pictures on record level.

Is the formula able to incorporate 'if-else' logic to produce results based on conditions and allow the establishment of conditions to determine when a formula will be applied and will the store and share formula be able to incorporate 'for-loop' logic to facilitate repetition operation?
Yes, 'If-else', 'for-loop','do-while' and many other complex programming logic can be incorporated in places where formula is supported.

Is it able to support VB scripting.
Speedminer support SQL, VB scripts as well as Object script.

Is it able to support slide presentation showing OLAP analysis and reports dynamically.
Yes, Speed Workflow supports slides presentation using dynamically refreshed dashboards.

i. Speedminer Server - Pentium IV 1.6 GHz, 1 Gig RAM. Depending on your source data size, if it is above 50 GB, more RAM (e.g. 2 Gig) would be recommended for better performance. Hard disk size is generally 3X your source data size, but it is recommended at least 5X the size of your operation database.
ii. Servers would include Windows NT/2000 Advance Server/XP for OS, which is for the ease of management and lower maintenance cost, otherwise Linux, and Unix environment would be perfectly fine.

iii. Workstations would need Windows (for running Windows version), or a machine running Internet Explorer (for web version). Client's machine should have at least 128 MB RAM (prefer 256 Mb) to have the data warehouse to run smoothly. Speedminer supports Windows 98/NT/2000/XP/2003, Linux and Unix.
iv. For web version, you will require a separate setup of web server, firewall etc, which will be provided if needed as we have our own firewall product and internet security experts.
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) requires your database to provide a mechanism for us to access data, either through ODBC, text file, or other open architecture mechanism. It will be run on the Speedminer Server.

Speedminer handles real time data update, this may incur slight overhead on the operation system, as a low priority process will be run on Speedminer Server constantly checks the availability of newly updated data. The important thing to note for this feature would be:
i. The required hard disk size will be larger (estimate 7X of the source data size) and this may vary depending on the relationship between the tables used in Speedminer, and the distribution of code table data.
ii. The table in source data must have either Last_Update_Date_Time or equivalent field to track such information, or an audit trail table, which allow Speedminer to check for newly updated records.
iii. The interval of fetching data will determine how "real time" is your data warehouse, short interval tends to burden the operation system more, but a long interval will cause data warehouse to be "less real time". Complete real time with minimum overhead can be achieved if the operation system is also running on the same object and multi-dimensional database Caché.
iv. Speedminer ETL can also draw data from the mirror server of the source database (thus freeing the load of your operation system), but this may impact the "real time" of Speedminer due to the time interval taken by mirror server to be updated.
The technology used for keeping real time is multi-dimensional indexing and bitmap indexing for all our data storage. No binary or other indexing method is required, as our indexing method has been well tested to suit OLAP environment best.

Yes, Speed Office in Speedminer supports document management system, web mail and BLOG, which are tightly integrated with the rest of the Speedmimer modules.