Colin Taylor, IBM’s Technical Sales Manager for Business Intelligence and GSE (Guide Share Europe) and IDUG (International DB2 User Group) Liaison opened the meeting. Colin said he would act as chairman of the meeting unless anyone else was willing. He also asked for people to join the UG steering committee where decisions are made jointly. Colin thanked everyone for coming and explained why we run these meetings and how it had evolved from the OLAP UG to BI and Warehousing. He emphasised that this was not an IBM run Marketing and Sales event, but a meeting where we try to have a two way session and aim for maximum involvement with the audience getting what they need from the meeting.
Simon Woodcock, IBM IT Consultant, gave the latest updates on the DB2 and BI Warehousing product line.
DB2_9_Overview.pdf
Jaap Vink, SPSS (IBM Business Partner) presented on ‘Using Data Mining Workbench with DB2’s integrated DM Scoring, modelling and
visualisations’. Jaap gave an overview of Clementine Data Mining Workbench.
SPSS20061031_v1.pdf
Jim Lyon, IBM IT Consultant - Jim explained MDM (Master Data
Management) how existing systems can be brought together to create a central single operational view of customer and products.
Master Data Management and BI.pdf
Haider Rizvi, Senior Technical Manager, DB2 data warehousing performance and BCU development in the IBM Toronto Lab, focussing on BCU, Linux in IBM's
Data Warehousing Strategy. Haider explained why IBM had created the BCU concept and how its principles were available to download to those who register.
061031 Linux BCU EMEA BI UG.pdf
Discussion continued during the dinner sponsored by IBM.
Colin Taylor gave an update on our relationship with GSE & IDUG for the benefit of the attendees who were not able to be present on Day 1.
Jim Lyon, IBM IT Consultant - ‘Utilizing Data Models to Rapidly Develop a Data Warehouse’. Jim explained how these models had evolved and are used in many companies for Insurance/Banking/Finance/Industry/Retail & Telco.
Utilizing data models to rapidly develop a data warehouse.pdf
Simon Woodcock, IBM IT Consultant presented the BCU which had been implemented at Cyprus Telecom, a large 32 processor system that had been upgraded recently and implement as a complete BCU system
Customer Migration to bcu.pdf
Customer Presentations & Stories - other questions drove this session
Martin Pozdilek of MF Service asked a question about the restrictions on security in Alphablox and the position of Alphablox in IBM’s product system. Jacqueline Bloemen of BeKs Consulting kindly explained the position.
Jacqueline Bloemen of BeKs Consulting (Business eKnowledge Solutions) Gmbh is an IT Consultant and works with her customers specialising on strategy and analysis of their systems. Jacqueline explained the history of OLAP and the differences between OLAP/ROLAP/MOLAP/HOLAP/DOLAP. Jacqueline also gave an update to the presentation made at a previous user group meeting which is now a post POC situation in a large German Insurance Company. Her second example was a slightly different test working with Cognos and IBM at their IBM Innovation
Centre in Stuttgart, testing h/w and s/w and results. A 'White Paper’ will be published with the results for Retail/Telco and Finance business cases.
BIUG Big Olap.pdf
Jacqueline was formerly an IDUG Board Member and explained the benefits of being a member of IDUG.
Please visit www.idug.org to
enrol then just click the link to "sign up" on the left hand side in the members area access column of the page.
Haider Rizvi, Senior Technical Manager, DB2 data warehousing performance and BCU development, IBM Toronto Lab gave a presentation on Performance and Tuning. Interesting information can be found by looking up the ‘Triple Crown’ benchmark results at
http://www.tpc.org and
www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/.
Or search on Google 'benchmarks’ and select DMSVS SMS to review.
Haider informed us that a white paper has been written and can be found at:-
Improve database performance on file system containers in IBM DB2 UDB V8.2 using Concurrent I/O on AIX
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0408lee/index.html.
061101 DW Perftunfundamentals.pdf
Colin Taylor closed the meeting and thanked the Speakers and the Audience for their participation.
Feedback satisfaction forms were distributed to the attendees via e-mail. The Net Satisfaction Index was 100% satisfied, made up from:-
75% Very Good
25% Good
The following specific comments were made:-
I would like to see presentation/topic areas, which are useful to beginners, covered in a future Meeting.
Pres of DWTools (Cognos, SAS, Hyperion + more info from IBM Developers + UG address list.
There was a heavy weight on DB2 & DWH. Next time I would like topics to focus on Front end and end user apps like Alphablox + workplace offerings like in Lotus Brand.
I attended for the What's new in V9. DW not usually my scope. I am mainly interested in the theoretical side of DW'ing and data modelling.
Gill Dawson
User Group Secretary
IBM UK