While best known for selling data center equipment and consumer electronics, Dell has also quietly established itself a leader in information management, a position that the latest changes to the toolkit that helped bring its competitive efforts this far aim to cement. The update extends its value proposition further beyond the original pitch of automating everyday operations to enabling modern analytics.

The data preparation component of Toad, which is currently used by more than two million database professionals, is receiving new profiling functionality designed to help assess the integrity and usefulness of information. Administrators can perform filtering accordingly using complementary transformation capabilities introduced in conjunction that the company says can simply error clearing.

The ability to carry out that chore with fewer steps – and thus less opportunity for human error – is becoming increasingly important as organizations process not only more and more data but from a growing number of sources as well, which is increasing the impact of inconsistencies exponentially. That complexity also creates challenges in other parts of the analytics lifecycle,, which Dell is trying to address too as part of the update.

More specifically, the company is integrating Toad with its data integration and statistical analysis services to provide more advanced capabilities for processing information from multiple sources, with a particular emphasis on SAP’s newly supported HANA in-memory store and Hadoop. But that is not to say Dell is neglecting the rest of the toolkit’s install base.

Quite the opposite. The update also includes a brand new release of Toad for Oracle, the original edition of the software dating all the way back to the late 1990s, that packs new sharing features meant to help developers and database administrators work together more efficiently. There’s also a new dashboard designed to make it easier to check the quality of the code produced through that collaboration.

Photo credit via Dell
.