BIReady announces Version4.5, the acknowledged standardized data warehouse automation software.
Besides a diversity of customer requested enhancements for the easiness of usage of BIReady there is also brand new functionality like the support of MySQL and State Oriented Fact tables.

The State Oriented Fact table is unique functionality, close to what is known as Kimball type 6, or as other people call ‘the twin timestamp approach’.
In short: In such a fact table each row represents the state of an object during a period of time in which this state didn't change. It is a kind of type 2 approach to the fact table.
Imagine an insurance company and claim reporting in particular, including open reserves and paid amounts as of the time of the end of a period. These reports must show the state of the claim and related policy as of the reporting date, not at the time of the transactions, nor at the time that the report is run. With a traditional transaction-oriented fact table and "Type 1" or "Type 2" dimensions this is quite complex and error-prone, but with a state-oriented fact table the query is very simple. This will cut development time, allows reports to run much faster, and will reduce the maintenance costs significantly.

By the end of this year version 5 will be released with even more functionality and features, including another graphical display of the model and data marts, optimized restart capabilities and integration with ETL tools (This means that the BIReady generated ETL statements can be executed by third party ETL tools, as an alternative for our own engine).
The latter will be very valuable for (larger) organizations that already have huge BI and ETL investments in place. It also opens the door for using BIReady as a prototyping tool or communication between IT and Business enabler, where the production environment already in place can remain.

Bron: BIReady.