We didn't see any real solutions in a shrink-wrapped format that were easy to use. That was the idea of the company. The company recently announced release 3.4 of dfPower Studio. The product identifies duplicate records, normalizes inconsistent data, and improves the merging capability of data from dissimilar data sources. Version 3.4 adds the ability to automatically generate SQL, to edit generated standard logic on screen, and to change capitalization for any data in the database.
Current customers receive the product at no additional charge.
The company targeted users of departmental data marts being constructed on servers running Microsoft Windows NT or Unix. DataFlux concentrated on making the product extremely easy to use, with point and click wizards that set up easily. Competitors include Vality, Trillium, and IDCentric, the latter company having evolved from the U.S. Postal Service. DataFlux differentiates on ease of use and lower price, Brauer said. The company's team of development engineers, who since 1996 have been improving the product's algorithms, based on phonetics, linguistics, and statistics, is its real secret.