Wednesday, September 28, 2011

IBM announces Smart Analytics System 5710

Last week (September 2011), IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 5710, which is a database appliance for business intelligence and data analytics targeted at the SMB market. The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 is based on IBM System x, runs Linux, and includes InfoSphere Warehouse Departmental Edition and Cognos 10 Business Intelligence Reporting and Query.

The announcement of this appliance was somewhat lost in the shuffle of Oracle's marketing blitz for its similar Oracle Database Appliance, also announced last week. But IBM's offering is geared and pre-configured for quick deployment of analytics and business intelligence capabilities.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 is powered by the InfoSphere Warehouse Departmental Edition which is built on a DB2 data server, and features Optim Performance Manager, DB2 Workload Manager, Deep Compression and Multidimensional clustering.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 provides key capabilities of reporting, analysis and dashboards to enable fast answers to key business questions delivered as a cost-effective solution designed for rapid deployment. It allows users to quickly extract maximum insight and value from multiple data sources and deliver a consistent view of information across all business channels.

It also provides cubing services giving users a multidimensional view of data stored in a relational database. Users can create, edit, import, export, and deploy cube models over the relational warehouse schema to perform deeper multi-dimensional analysis of multiple business variables improving both profitability and customer satisfaction. Cubing services also provide optimization techniques to dramatically improve the performance of OLAP queries.

Additionally, the powerful, yet simple, data mining capabilities enable integrated analytics of both structured and unstructured data in the system. Standard data mining models are supported and can be developed via drag and drop in an intuitive design environment.

So what does it cost? For a such a rich collection of software, the starting price is just under $50K. Furthermore, the new offering is part of the IBM Smart Analytics System family, which consists of solutions that span multiple hardware platforms and architectures, including the mainframe (System z).

Thursday, September 01, 2011

DB2 10 for z/OS: For Developers Only!

Today's blog post is to promote an upcoming FREE webinar that I will be delivering titled DB2 10: For Developers Only! The presentation is sponsored by the good folks at SoftBase Systems. and it will be conducted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm EST.

This presentation highlights the DB2 10 for z/OS enhancements that directly impact DB2 application developers. Every release of DB2 is chock full of new features and functionality and that can make it hard to focus on those things that are most helpful for programmers. So instead of scanning volumes of manuals, you can watch this presentation distills the DB2 10 information down to cover what should be most important to programmer/analysts.

Examples of areas this presentation will cover include:
• Binding issues and details for V10
• Temporal support with examples
• A new type of function
• New timestamp options and some improvements to existing SQL
• Implicit casting, access to currently committed data, and much more…

If you are a programmer wanting to learn more about DB2 10, or a DBA looking for the programmer’s perspective on DB2 10, this presentation should have something to offer you.

This is sort of a tradition for me... you may have heard me give a similar presentation for previous DB2 versions. Well, this webinar introduces a brand new presentation in this series, this time for DB2 Version 10...

So register today!