Yes! Here’s how to set up business intelligence quickly and cost-effectively.

During the development of a typical business intelligence solution, you gather user requirements, catalog existing data elements, identify the new data elements for the data warehouse, and make your hardware selections. You create procedures and programs to reformat, redefine, summarize, and transfer the data to data warehouse files. You define dimensions and drill pathways to structure your data warehouse properly. You hire additional staff to manage the new environment. Typically, the project timeline expands as new requirements surface and original specifications change. Finally, often months after the original target date and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, your business intelligence system may be ready.

Data Warehouse: The real costs
What are the real costs of the traditional data warehouse for the System i-centric customer? It’s a lot because you are used to managing a technology that has consistent processing, security, operations, and system availability. The traditional data warehouse usually runs on another platform that brings new management challenges: new staff, new vendors, and new operational requirements. Change is often a good thing, but in this case, at what cost? System i customers cannot continue to lose time to these large-scale, out-of-scope projects.

Data Warehouse: The better way
There is a better way—business intelligence centered around the System i using SEQUEL. The information is there, waiting for you to extract it directly from your transaction database without data warehouse files or additional hardware. In less than five minutes, you can use SEQUEL to create a view and perform “drill-down” analysis of a transaction database containing millions of records. There’s no need to define “drill paths,” create data warehouse files, or perform any other setup. Users can view data at a summary level and drill down into the details that make up the summarized information, all on the fly. And, if you need to modify the view, you can make changes in minutes.

With a System i-centric solution like SEQUEL, you can deploy a business intelligence solution faster and more effectively than with any other approach. The argument that you need to off-load the data to achieve performance just doesn’t make sense. With the System i, you can leave the data where it is and access it in real time. The benefits are enormous. No out-of-sync databases, and no questions or skepticism from the end users on the validity of the data. If running a business intelligence solution does impact your performance, you can upgrade your System i. Chances are the upgrade is far less expensive than setting up a traditional data warehouse.

You might think that an upgrade is too expensive. But, it shouldn’t be if you do a real cost-of-ownership analysis. Consider the cost to build the data warehouse: new hardware, new staff, new BI software, new operations software (anti-virus, security, backup, scheduling), and more. Factor in the costs of waiting 9 to 12 months to put a non-System i-centric solution to work and it becomes an extremely expensive sell to upper management. Contrast this with investing in a System i-centric solution that can be available within days of receiving some training.

What about the performance on the production System i? How will this impact your environment? Starting with V5R3, enhancements to i5/OS allow the System i to crunch millions of data records in a fraction of the time previously required. Business intelligence tools written specifically for the System i use IBM APIs and the i5/OS query processor, allowing you to retrieve database information in the fastest, most efficient ways. Instead of investing in a staff of data warehouse professionals, consider training your current System i staff to better understand database access processes.

Data Warehouse: An easier implementation
Sound too good to be true? It’s not. With System i-centric tools like SEQUEL, you avoid the time-consuming and costly process of defining a data warehouse. With the enhanced query processor, you can run requests directly over transaction files or extract files, eliminating the need to create separate data warehouse files. If database files are extremely large, you can refine access paths, indexes, and JOIN relationships to fine-tune and improve performance. And, if summary files are required, it’s easy to create them directly on the system.

Do you have old native queries that you want to convert? It’s simple with a System i native business intelligence tool. SEQUEL can read those definitions and, in a matter of minutes, your old query is an object on a multi-panel dashboard. Your old query has just been given new life as a summary table ready for management to drill into against the live data. A range of industry-standard formats are supported.

Because native BI tools can access the native file definitions, they have an advantage over other solutions. All field definitions, file layouts, and relationships are readily available within seconds. There’s no need to redefine your database on another platform.

Count on your System i
What about your data on other platforms? If you have DB2/400 along with other databases such as SQL server on Windows or an Oracle database on AIX, your System i can link this data, too. Your executive dashboard or key performance indicators can include data from all of your databases. And, you can access this information from a single query engine centered on System i.

Using the System i, you can quickly and easily set up a powerful, cost-effective, and flexible business intelligence solution at your site, without a time-consuming, expensive data warehouse development project. Every user—from executives to managers to end users—can enjoy fast, easy access to the information they need to make better-informed business decisions. It’s never too late to pull the plug on your traditional data warehouse project.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:52 am and is filed under SEQUEL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.