Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

Chapter 2. Overview of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition 17

򐂰 Time travel query: Reduce development time and improve the Extract,

Transform, and Load (ETL) capability.

To address simplicity, the IBM DB2 relational database engine can be installed

on a single hardware server, or as a partitioned relational database over many

hardware servers aimed at providing high performance.

2.1.2 WebSphere Application Server

IBM WebSphere® Application Server is a scalable Java application server that is

capable of being implemented in either a single or multiple instance

configuration. It is therefore able to support varying workloads, from small

departmental web applications to the demands of large scale, dynamic

applications within an enterprise environment that require redundancy and

failover capabilities.

The included WebSphere Application Server is required to host the InfoSphere

Warehouse server application that provides the runtime elements of the Extract,

Transform and Load, cubing services, and data mining elements of the data

warehouse solution.

2.1.3 InfoSphere Warehouse Server

IBM InfoSphere Warehouse Server is the runtime and administration element of

the complete InfoSphere Warehouse solution. The runtime elements are a J2EE

application, hosted within the WebSphere Application Server.

One of the functions of the InfoSphere Warehouse runtime server, working in

partnership with the DB2 database engine, is to provide the infrastructure to

perform data movement and transformation (ETL) operations on the data

contained within the database.

The runtime server also provides advanced analytics in the form of OLAP cubing

services and data mining for both discovery and predictive analytics, along with

text analytics for working with unstructured content.

For more detail about InfoSphere Warehouse Server, see 2.2, “InfoSphere

Warehouse technical overview” on page 25.

2.1.4 InfoSphere Federation Server

InfoSphere Federation Server enables a data warehouse to reach beyond the

confines of the local instance of the DB2 database. This function provides a

consolidated view of the selected data taken from disparate database sources,