Atheon Analytics has collaborated with data company Exasol to create a high-speed database that tracks the sale of retail products.

Technology supplier Atheon, whose clients supply to the big four grocers Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, is using data insight capabilities from Exasol to monitor how various products have sold across a retailer’s store estate in real time.

Called Skutrak, the retail analysis tool collects data from Atheon’s retail clients on a daily basis and converts it into visual displays.

Atheon tested free community database technology from Exasol with a supermarket partner and found that it was able to analyse 250 million rows of trading data to produce statistics on waste reduction and stock control.

Atheon’s managing director Guy Cuthbert said: “Exasol is the responsive, highly capable analytic database engine we need, and we have now moved to the commercial version to explore and manipulate data at much higher speeds for our clients.

“The key feature for us is that it is simple to use; we can load data quickly and generate results for our clients extremely quickly.”