Industry Process Accelerator for Business Intelligence
A tool for modeling and generating data marts for DB2 Data Warehouse Edition.
Date Posted: October 27, 2004
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What is Industry Process Accelerator for Business Intelligence?
Industry Process Accelerator for Business Intelligence (IPA4BI) is a tool for modeling and generating data marts for DB2 Data Warehouse Edition. IPA4BI provides a framework for the creation of shareable and customizable templates for business intelligence. It is a centralized OLAP modeling tool that will provide a set of assets that can be used for end-to-end integration.
The innovation in this tool is that the templates contain expert domain knowledge, data modeling, sample data, and reports that can be used as-is or with customization. Possible customization options include adding new dimensions, hierarchies, and measures, depending on the business needs. Customized templates can be contributed to the library for later reuse. The tool will also allow the mixing together of assets from different industry libraries.
This tool is composed of an Eclipse plug-in with wizard, view, and editor extensions. It makes extensive use of XML. Included with the downloadable version from alphaWorks is the accelerator run time, tutorial documentation, and a sample industry template containing sample data, database scripts, and files for DB2 Cube Views.
How does it work? The tool is an Eclipse plug-in that accelerates the creation of a business intelligence solution by importing existing solution models and/or creating custom models, which can then be used to generate DDL scripts for data marts, metadata files for DB2 Cube Views, and sample data. The tool collects business requirements from the GUI. The tool users are able to specify which subject areas contained in a library that they'd like to use from various industries, and what stand-alone dimensions they would like to incorporate into their models. The tool also allows custom measures and dimensions to be defined. The user's selections of preexisting assets and customizations are captured in an internal model for the tool.
The tool generates assets for a business intelligence solution based on its internal model. Assets generated by the tool include data definition language (DDL) scripts for creating a star-schema relational database, OLAP models for IBM DB2 Cube Views 8.1.2, and sample data population scripts. The tool consists of different generators for each asset. Each generator looks at the tool's internal model and renders a particular component. Sample data is generated based on values specified in CSV files (editable in Excel).
In the context of a Business Intelligence solution around DB2 Cube Views, the assets generated from the tool are run on the data warehouse server to create a data mart. The tool generates sample data for data marts, but it does not address the issue of importing data from a production database server into a data mart for analysis, commonly referred to as ETL (extract, transform, load). As delivered, the tool includes a library template that resembles the MDSAMPLE data mart from IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition. Additional library templates can be created by contributing new or customized templates back into the library. Library templates can be shared with other tool users by sharing the directory containing a library template.
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| | About the technology author(s):
Members of the IBM Solutions Builder Express team in Research Triangle Park, N.C., developed this Eclipse plug-in. Architects John Medicke and Thomas Pack, Software engineers Michael Donaghy, Steve Rutledge, Feng-wei Chen, and Tintin Sukawati, and co-ops Nikhil Parekh and Kapish Aggarwal all contributed to the development of this tool.
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