发信人: stonec()
整理人: (1999-05-08 01:21:17), 站内信件
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Q&A: MARK WULF ON THE AS/400 AS A "FULL-RANGE" BI SERVER
http://www.news400.com/redir/redirDB.cfm?ID=466
Mark Wulf, business intelligence segment manager for IBM's AS/400
Partners in Development, sat down with NEWS/400's Kathy Blomstrom
and Cheryl Ross at IBM's Business Partner Executive Conference in
New Orleans this week to talk about V4R4's new database functions
and what they mean to the AS/400's business intelligence and
e-business strategies.
NEWS/400: What are the most significant enhancements to DB2/400,
which changed its name to DB2 Universal Database for AS/400 (DB2
UDB/400) with V4R4?
WULF: The most significant news about the enhancements is the fact
that the UDB databases are even more alike than ever before.
Application development across platforms becomes much easier,
especially in this new world of Java and e-business. The biggest
enhancements for UDB are the extensions for non-relational data.
The ability to store BLOBS, CLOBS, unstructured data. From a
business intelligence view, what's really exciting about the new
announcements is encoded vector indexes (EVI). In the first stage
of EVIs, we used them mainly for selection -- to be able to select
out the records you asked for. In this second stage now, we've
added the capabilities to be able to do join processing -- to join
together records from multiple tables. And most specifically, EVIs
help the optimization of a star schema database design -- a very
common database physical layout.
We're also excited about the new high-availability clustering
features in the announcement because of the competitive
positioning it gives us in the reliability area. And V4R4's
logical partitioning (LPAR) again gives us a lot of competitive
advantage in being able to split these big systems apart. With
LPAR, you can define partitions that look like completely separate
machines; they just happen to be housed in the same box. There are
a lot of applications, especially with a data warehouse, where you
want to segment users off to scope out just the resources they
need for their specific area, and LPAR will let you further define
groups of users into areas of the system. We saw a survey a couple
of weeks ago that shows that almost 100 percent of customers use
this function on the mainframe because it's so useful for them in
managing their environment and their workload.
Another major part of the announcement is the partnership between
IBM and ShowCase to provide DB2 OLAP and resell all of ShowCase's
products through the IBM sales channels. That is an amazingly
powerful thing for us because, again, we have the same technology
across all platforms. The technology is portable across the IBM
servers, and it gives us a lot more people out there pushing
AS/400 data warehousing solutions.
NEWS/400: What does this relationship mean for other IBM Business
Partners in the business intelligence space?
WULF: The questions always come: "Oh no, IBM now has something, so
why would anyone want anything else?" The real strength of these
partners is the same strength that has always been there. They
have very industry-specific or application-specific solutions. The
technology that IBM is providing is not the technology that will
solve all customers' problems. In fact, it's more tools based.
We're providing the tools for people to create solutions, where a
lot of our other partners -- such as Silvon, InfoManager, System
Source -- provide the solutions base. So if you want to build your
own from the ground up, IBM has the technology for you. But a
large majority of our market is very solutions oriented, and those
other partners are continuing to market to those needs.
NEWS/400: What was the growth rate of business intelligence on the
AS/400 this past year?
WULF: Our business intelligence business on AS/400 doubled last
year. And although we don't expect that that rate can continue,
because doubling every year is quite a feat, we still see very
healthy growth in the AS/400 space both from a revenue point of
view and from a market share point of view.
NEWS/400: Where are you seeing the most growth, in data marts or
data warehousing?
WULF: Most of our revenue growth is coming on the high end,
because we're selling very large servers with these solutions.
>From a numbers point of view, we're seeing large growth in numbers
of boxes in the data mart space.
NEWS/400: Where is the AS/400 database stronger than other
databases?
WULF: We see our main strengths lying in two areas. The first area
is in scalability. We continue to be the only database in the
industry that is fully 64-bit enabled, and when you combine that
with the new hardware we're starting to ship, especially when we
look at main memory sizes, we have a tremendous competitive
advantage over the other people in the industry -- especially in a
data warehouse environment. Today, the machines come with 40 GB of
main memory. We've stated publicly that within the next 2-3 years,
those machines will ship with half a terabyte of main memory. And
that's something that's possible only through 64-bit technology.
The other major area where we continue to see a competitive
advantage is ease of use and administration. It's fairly common
knowledge that there aren't many AS/400 installations that have a
database administrator. They just don't require one. A lot of
activities that a normal database administrator would go through
just aren't done on the AS/400. You manage users from a system
perspective, not a database perspective, for example. And our
systems run; they don't require the same maintenance that other
databases do. So some of our competition are providing very nice
user interfaces, but if you look down deep at what people are
having to do through those interfaces, in most cases, you don't
have to do those things on the AS/400. We've published a series of
white papers on our Web site showing the things that you'd
normally do as a DBA and the equivalent on the AS/400, and the
majority of those things are fully automated by the system,
optimized by the system automatically.
NEWS/400: Someone said this week that they thought the term
"midrange" to describe the AS/400 was really a misnomer now --
that the platform can play strong in the entry space and in the
large, enterprise-scale level.
WULF: Last week, we held our BI University, which is a training
program for our partners and salespeople, and one of the speakers
kept saying "midrange this, midrange that." We decided at the end
that we were going to be "full range." Certainly the smallest
machines we've got, these 170s, are amazingly powerful for dirt
cheap. Most of the work we do in the business intelligence space
involves very large systems -- interconnected 12-ways, huge boxes,
multi-terabytes worth of data, and thousands and thousands of
users. It really is a strength of ours that I can walk in front of
a customer and say, "Today, you have a small problem that you want
to solve, and I can start you on a small AS/400 for a very
reasonable cost. But rest assured that as your problem grows and
you get more successful, I can take you all the way through the
product line without changing anything -- your database is always
the same, your operating system is always the same, and your
applications will continue to run." It's a very powerful story.
--
Keep It Simple and Stupid
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