Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

42 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

deployment, mining flows can also be added to the control flows. The

deployment process with the administration console is also similar.

Figure 2-13 Example data mining flow in Design Studio

Finally, you can use the Design Studio to manage and visualize the data mining

models residing in the database.

2.2.2 Overview of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

In this section we provide a brief overview of the technical components of IBM

Cognos Business Intelligence. For a more detailed description, see IBM Cognos

Business Intelligence V10.1 Handbook, SG24-7912.

The IBM Cognos Platform is built on a web-based, service-oriented architecture

(SOA) that is designed for scalability, availability, and openness. This n-tiered

architecture is made up of three server tiers:

򐂰 The web tier

򐂰 The application tier

򐂰 The data tier

Chapter 2. Overview of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition 43

The IBM Cognos Platform provides optimized access to all data sources,

including relational data sources and online analytical processing (OLAP), with a

single query service. In addition, this query service understands and takes

advantage of the data source strength by using a combination of open standards

such as SQL99, native SQL, and native MDX to optimize data retrieval for all

these different data providers. The IBM Cognos BI user interfaces are accessed

through the web tier. Figure 2-14 illustrates a typical deployment of the IBM

Cognos Platform.

Figure 2-14 Typical Cognos BI deployment

The web tier provides user session connectivity to IBM Cognos BI applications.

The IBM Cognos components that fulfill this role are referred to as the IBM

Cognos Gateway. This component manages all web communications for the IBM

Cognos Platform. The workload on the IBM Cognos Gateway server requires

minimal processing resources, and for high availability or scalability

requirements, multiple gateways can be implemented.

The application tier for the IBM Cognos Platform is made up of three main server

components:

򐂰 IBM Cognos Dispatcher

Presentation/Web Tier

Application Tier

Data Tier

IBM Cognos

Gateway

IBM Cognos

Content

Manager

Dispatcher

IBM Cognos

Report

Server

Dispatcher

IBM Cognos

Report

Server

Dispatcher

Security

Namespace

IBM Cognos

Content

Store

Data

Source

OLAP

Firewall/Router/Encryption

Firewall/Router/Encryption

44 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

򐂰 IBM Cognos Report Server

򐂰 IBM Cognos Content Manager

IBM Cognos Dispatcher performs the load balancing of requests at the

application tier. The IBM Cognos Dispatcher component is a lightweight Java

servlet that manages (and provides communication between) application

services.

The main service that is responsible for application-tier processing is the report

or query service. IBM Cognos Dispatcher starts IBM Cognos Report Server

processes dynamically as needed to handle the request load. An administrator

can specify the maximum number of processes that these services can start, and

the minimum number of processes that are to be running at non-peak times.

IBM Cognos Content Manager is the IBM Cognos Platform service that manages

the storage of the following customer application data:

򐂰 Security settings and configurations

򐂰 Server configuration settings

򐂰 Packages

򐂰 Dashboards

򐂰 Metrics

򐂰 Report specifications

򐂰 Report output

The IBM Cognos Content Manager function is to publish models, retrieve or store

report specifications, handle scheduling information, and manage the IBM

Cognos security name space. Information is maintained in a metadata database

that is referred to as the content store database; within an InfoSphere

Warehouse environment it is commonly given the database name “COGNODB”

within the DB2 instance. A minimum of one IBM Cognos Content Manager

service is required for each IBM Cognos Platform implementation.

The IBM Cognos BI data tier contains the following:

򐂰 Content store: Contains data required for Cognos BI to operate, such as

reports specifications, published models and the packages that contain them,

and connection information to data sources.

򐂰 Data sources: Known as query databases, these are the source of

information accessed by the Cognos BI application; they can include

relational databases and dimensional or OLAP cubes.

򐂰 Metric store: A relational database that contains the content for metric

packages.

The IBM Cognos Platform provides, through the data tier, a single point of

access to all data sources.

Chapter 2. Overview of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition 45

During the installation of IBM Cognos BI, you must specify where to install the

gateways, Application Tier Components, and Content Manager. These IBM

Cognos BI components can all be installed on one computer, or distributed

across a network on multiple hardware servers. The server components within all

three tiers can scale easily, either horizontally or vertically, to meet a variety of

business intelligence processing requirements.

Figure 2-15 illustrates a detailed view of IBM Cognos BI installed on a single

server.

Figure 2-15 Detailed view of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence