MONTREAL—February 7, 2008—SAND Technology Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of intelligent enterprise information management software, today announced the general availability of SAND/DNA Access version 2.4, the latest release of its high-efficiency nearline data storage software for analytic applications. Building on the impressive performance and functionality of earlier releases, SAND/DNA Access 2.4 provides superior support for storage and management of vast amounts of highly compressed data that can be easily queried without the need for prior decompression.

Specifically, release 2.4 of SAND/DNA Access incorporates the following new features and improvements:

• Data Encryption
  SAND/DNA Access now supports encryption of compressed nearline data. Users generate their own encryption key for use in creating the compressed data files, and must provide the same key to access this data afterwards.
• Metadata Transformation Rules
  Values returned by queries against compressed nearline data can now be substituted or filtered according to customizable rules. Specific values can be substituted when columns are missing (to accommodate changes to the data model over time), or a particular subset of the data can be hidden under specified conditions.
• Enhanced Analytical Capabilities and Performance for Nearline Queries, including:
  • Faster aggregation
  • Support for the HAVING clause
  • Support for aggregation of DISTINCT values
  • Support for CASE expressions
  • Support for random sampling of result sets.

“The explosion in the amounts of data that organizations produce and need to retain is becoming increasingly troublesome to traditional data warehouse implementations. For this reason, it is becoming more and more urgent to move much of this data into economical storage, while still keeping it readily accessible for queries and searches,” said Richard Grondin, Vice President of Research and Development for SAND Technology. “Our customers have been urging us to incorporate an additional level of security in our SAND/DNA Access nearline storage software, as well as to support more complex analytic capabilities for nearline data and increased flexibility in dealing with data model changes, and with SAND/DNA release 2.4 we have responded to these requests.”

SAND/DNA Access provides a highly compact, searchable nearline repository that can store terabytes, even petabytes, of data in typically less than 15 percent of the space required by an equivalent standard data warehouse based on RDBMS technology. At the same time, any of this nearline data is immediately accessible for querying and reporting, or for fast extraction back into SAND/DNA Analytics or any standard data warehouse.

SAND/DNA addresses the information needs of business organizations in three crucial areas:

• Time: Years of data become available, with read-only protection and full versioning
• Granularity: All detailed records become available
• Responsiveness: Supports full ad hoc reporting on all data, and provides quick response to new reporting requirements

Unlike other Information Lifecycle Management products that focus solely on managing the storage of data on different media, SAND/DNA Access is specifically designed to provision data for analytic use, offering:

• A complete, detailed historical data repository without the need to pre-index
• Maximum efficiency of storage and total cost of ownership
• Maximum availability of warehoused data
• Maximum flexibility in responding to new analytical requirements

— with minimal administration requirements, ultimately enabling better business intelligence to support faster, better informed business decisions.

Compatible with most popular hardware and software environments, SAND/DNA Access brings highly economical and accessible nearline storage to existing data warehouse systems — enabling maximum return on investments in business intelligence infrastructure.