A large retailer wants to know how many camcorders the company sold in 1998, and sends that query to the MPP system. The query goes out to one of the processors which acts as the coordinator, it breaks up the query for optimum performance. Each sub-query is assigned to a specific processor in the system. To allow this to happen, the database was previously partitioned. For example, a sales tracking database might be broken down by month, and each processor holds data for one month's worth of sales information.
Final answer is returned to the user.
Randy Erdahl, group manager of marketing analysis at catalog retailer Fingerhut Cos., describes the company's MPP system called Mail Stream Optimization. Payment history, purchase history, mailing instructions, demographics are stored and modeled, and the SAS code individually scores each customer per catalog. The system allows us to make 100 decisions in concert, instead of 100 independent decisions. We send 7 million customer records through the process every week. We went live in September.