Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

414 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

12.1 Challenges to maintaining an operational

warehouse

In today’s business environment, one method that companies use to maintain or

increase profitability is to continually drive down costs. This usually translates to

accomplishing more with fewer resources. When these aspirations are applied to

the data warehouse environment, companies want to store larger amounts of

data preferably on the same amount of storage, or maximize the performance of

their hardware. Or even to reduce the number of administrators required to

maintain the solution.

Therefore, the pressure on a database administrator to achieve these goals

never diminishes. As such, DBAs must introduce and use a range of tools if they

are ever to meet these targets. Optim Configuration Manager is one such tool

that IBM offers to assist DBAs in improving their efficiency, while also helping

them understand their complex environment.

In a production environment, it is critical that a database structure remains

efficient by reducing the risk of performance degradation or more importantly,

preventing system failure. There are many reasons for failures to occur, from

unregistered system changes to uncoordinated application updates. Whatever

the reason, these types of production issues can be costly to a company, not only

in system downtime and lost production, but also in damage to the reputation of

the company.

An additional benefit of implementing Optim Configuration Manager is the

capability to help maintain an efficient database structure and thus reduce the

risk of these types of failures.

12.2 InfoSphere Optim Configuration Manager

IBM InfoSphere Optim Configuration Manager is an advanced database

management tool from the Optim family of applications that is used to assist

organizations and database administrators in the performance of their roles. The

tool can be purchased either individually from IBM or in a more cost-efficient

solution as part of Infosphere Warehouse Advanced Edition.

The key role of InfoSphere Optim Configuration Manager is to provide a central

store and easy-to-use web interface for discovery, storage, and management of

database and client configuration information. This type of information can

include, for example, host names, IP addresses, user IDs, and DB2 client

versions details.

Chapter 12. InfoSphere Warehouse resilience with Optim Configuration Manager 415

The tool also provides the features to:

򐂰 Define standard client connection definitions for databases, including

database location and driver properties. Storing this information in a central

location within the Optim tool metadata database improves manageability and

allows DBAs to track client access to data servers.

򐂰 Allow DBAs to set and modify properties of deployed database clients to

improve database transaction performance and allocate data clients among

data servers for the workload balance that you want by redirecting clients to

alternative data servers. This feature allows users to maintain application

performance and availability to meet production objectives.

򐂰 Provide DBAs with the tools required to track changes of database and client

configurations to determine the root cause of performance degradation or

outage of a production application. Optim Configuration Manager offers the

capability to redirect clients and offending applications to the alternative high

availability data servers when the production server is not available.

This same feature can also be used to redirect client connections while

system maintenance is being performed on a data server, or to migrate client

connections from an older data server version to a new one.

򐂰 Provide DBAs with the ability to reduce the maximum number of

simultaneous connections to a driver and throttle an application to ease

certain performance issues.

򐂰 Analyze database servers and their storage with the aim of making

recommendations on either which compression type to apply to a data set, or

in implementing a multi-temperature storage solution. These capabilities help

to save costs related to additional hardware and software.

InfoSphere Optim Configuration Manager must be installed either on its own

hardware platform or as part of a shared Optim tools server platform. If installed

as part of a shared Optim tools server platform, a number of subcomponents of

the Optim applications are only installed one time and then shared by the

additional installed Optim tools.

An example is the DB2 relational database that is installed to host the metadata

repository; any additional Optim tools installed will use the same repository for

their schemas and tables. Figure 12-1 on page 416 shows the major architectural

elements of Optim Configuration Manager, consisting of a metadata repository