Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

Chapter 1. Solving complex operational warehouse challenges 5

include capabilities that streamline administration and lower the overall cost of

ownership.

Lack of real-time operational data

Business decision making often gets stalled or delayed due to non-availability of

accurate, real-time operational data, which results in missing out on identifying

opportunities and important insights. This happens because of many reasons.

Delays in capturing operational data into the data warehouse due to archaic ETL

processes are where the problem begins. Performance overheads in handling

heavy workloads and complex queries from the data warehouse for analytics

processing is another major issue. Non-responsive resource allocation within the

data warehouse as per priority and criticality of data, ultimately results in

hindering faster analytic results.

1.1.4 Gain insight without boundaries with IBM InfoSphere

Warehouse

Businesses must address these challenges and work to achieve on-demand

access to insight. If they succeed, they can target smaller customer segments

and communicate with them about their individual needs and wants. They can

identify and capitalize on even the smallest trends, attaining competitive

advantages normally only realized by more flexible and dynamic businesses.

They can detect small behavior patterns that can have a significant influence and

impact on business in terms of revenue, expenses, and growth. Most important,

they can build competitive strategies around data-driven insights and generate

impressive business results.

1.2 Comprehensive data warehouse solution

Designed to be a comprehensive data warehouse solution, InfoSphere

Warehouse enables organizations to centrally, accurately, and securely analyze

and deliver information as part of their operational and strategic business

applications. Different from the traditional data warehouses and BI solutions,

which can be complex, rigid, and inflexible, InfoSphere Warehouse simplifies the

processes of selecting, deploying, and maintaining an information management

infrastructure, while offering the flexibility for dynamically integrating and

transforming data into actionable business insights and empowering

organizations to make timely, informed decisions in real time as business events

occur.

6 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

In addition, InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Editions deliver advanced design,

administration, and tooling capabilities that facilitate simplified management and

deployment of warehouses across a dynamic business and IT landscape.

InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Editions, which are available in Enterprise and

Departmental Editions, deliver a comprehensive set of InfoSphere Warehouse

Packs for simple deployment of leading prebuilt industry models and IBM

Cognos Business Intelligence reports. This functionality enables organizations to

easily understand and gain insight into their markets, campaigns, clients, and

supply chains. Additional management and architecture tools included in the

Advanced Enterprise Edition can help organizations deploy, manage, grow, and

architect increasingly business-critical and complex warehouse environments.

To speed and simplify deployment, InfoSphere Warehouse can be deployed on

any VMware server platform. IT teams can bypass installation and setup

activities, reduce time-to-value, and free database administrators (DBAs) to

focus on higher-value projects. The virtualized InfoSphere Warehouse provides

the flexibility to manage fluctuation in database activity. IT teams have the

freedom to adjust processors, data storage capacity, and hardware quickly and

easily to adapt to changing business needs.

InfoSphere Warehouse is powered by the IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX and

Windows data server. With its massively scalable, shared-nothing architecture,

IBM DB2 provides high performance for mixed-workload query processing

against both relational and native XML data. Advanced features such as data

partitioning, compression, multidimensional clustering (MDC), materialized query

tables (MQT), and OLAP capabilities make IBM DB2 a powerful engine for

operational warehousing.

InfoSphere Warehouse provides advanced capabilities for data partitioning,

giving IT users multiple ways to distribute data across servers for large-scale

parallelism and linear scalability. The shared-nothing architecture of IBM DB2

helps ensure that performance will not degrade as the warehouse grows. And

because InfoSphere Warehouse can physically cluster data on multiple

dimensions, order data by value range, and limit I/O to relevant data partitions, it

helps reduce the work needed to resolve many queries.

InfoSphere Warehouse transparently splits the database across multiple

partitions and uses the horsepower of multiple servers to satisfy requests for

large amounts of information. SQL statements are automatically decomposed

into subrequests that are run in parallel across the partitions. Results of the

subrequests are joined to provide final results.

Table partitioning offers easy roll-in and roll-out of table data, flexible index

placement, and efficient query processing. Rolling in partitioned table data allows

a new range to be easily incorporated into a partitioned table as an additional