IBM beefs up analytics in DB2

MarketWatch: Business Intelligence, June 19, 2003

IBM Corp has laid out a development roadmap that will bolster its flagship DB2 relational database platform with enhanced analytic features. The announcement has put a smile on the faces of DB2 customers at the company's International DB2 Users Group (IDUG) 2003 conference being held in Las Vegas, Nevada this week.

IBM officials said it would partner with business intelligence (BI) vendors to boost DB2's analytic capabilities in terms of application integration and coexistence. For example, IBM plans to enhance the online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities to support what it calls "cube views", Put simply, a cube view allows users to access single OLAP multidimensional cubes from third-party BI vendors using native tools and interfaces and without forcing any reformatting. When sourcing cubes from third-party vendors, some BI vendors 'flatten' them and rebuild them according to their own proprietary cube formats.

Additionally, the new cube function will also put less of a strain on system resources, pleasing companies that need to use various tools but don't have the CPU processing power to easily break down and reload a cube. That cube view function will be embedded in DB2 Version 8.1.2 and is expected in June 2003.

The analytic enhancement comes on the back of a busy week in which IBM officials announced several planned upgrades for DB2 platform, specifically in the area of performance (more buffer pools in memory), resilience (the ability to make changes to the data schemas without having to bring the system down), and recovery (allowing administrators to recoup previous data in the memory).