Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

64 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

Regarding the topologies listed, the Cognos BI element is, by default, installed

within the same tier as that of the InfoSphere Warehouse J2EE application and

the WebSphere Application Server. If additional performance is required for

supporting a larger number of Cognos BI users, the Cognos services, similar to

those of DB2, might be distributed over a number of physical servers.

2.3.2 Scenarios for implementing the Optim family of tools

In this section we discuss how we can introduce the family of Optim tools,

included as part of the Advanced Edition, into this data warehouse environment.

In a one-tier topology, that is, the type of implementation utilized for development

and limited testing, it might be necessary to install one or more of the Optim

tools. InfoSphere Optim Query Workload Tuner, InfoSphere Optim High

Performance Unload, and InfoSphere Data Architect are command-line utilities

that will not have a significant impact on the system.

Other tools, such as InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager and InfoSphere

Optim Configuration Manager, require an Optim metadata database that has to

reside within a DB2 instance that is different from the default warehouse

instance. This is because the Optim instance must be implemented with a

different set of DB2 configuration settings.

Although it is feasible to install and execute the InfoSphere Warehouse Server

and Client applications along with the Cognos BI server and the InfoSphere

Optim family on one platform, in reality it is impractical. If all of these elements

need to be hosted on one physical server, a more suitable solution is to create a

virtual two-tier solution.

In this scenario, one virtual platform hosts all the components found within a

single tier implementation of InfoSphere Warehouse. The second virtual

platform, with its own operating system, hosts the required InfoSphere Optim

tools, along with a copy of DB2 into which the Optim metadata database is to be

loaded. Both of these virtual platforms can then be hosted on the same physical

server. This scenario was used in the creation of our test environment as

outlined in more detail in Chapter 3, “Scenario: Warehouse Live Demo Set” on

page 69.

To implement a two-tier environment, whether using two virtual platforms or with

two physical servers, the practical solution is to host the InfoSphere Warehouse

components on one platform and the Optim tools on a second platform.

If, because of the size or number of data warehouse systems being monitored,

the InfoSphere Optim tools require additonal resources, they can be then