Getting ready for the IBM Corporate Service Corps Assignment

It is starting to sink in that I leave for China in under a month. I’m not sure that I’ve been away for 36 days away from home since my time living abroad in Spain during my undergraduate days years ago.

For those not aware, I am participating in IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC) program and will be acting as a goodwill business ambassador in Nanning, China for about a month. Information on IBM’s CSC program can be found in this link here and I have attached a video below.]

Considering that I have completely slacked on my Mandarin training – I’m starting to get a bit concerned with my immersion. In most countries with languages based on the Germanic or Romance-based languages, I have picked up enough to get by – Yet remembering my last trip to Beijing and Xian, I remember being completely lost with the language and intonations, etc. No rest for the wicked, right?

During my trip, I will be branching off a separate section of the blog focused on my travels and business experience in country. I have invested in a new video camera and will be attempting to publish a regular video blog in concert with this one. (Yet am a complete neophyte with the camera and editing suite, so apologies on jerky camera work in advance)

As I get more material on the assignments, I’ll outline them here – use it as a forum for not just my experiences in the CSC program, but also for doing business in China. At the moment I have three major clients that I will be focused on:

Agri-Business / Ecotourism: A regional sugarcane plantation that is looking at expanding not only it’s current business, but also wants to get into eco-tourism – Looking at advanced sugarcane mechanization

Consumer Products (Alcoholic Beverages): Company that is a Maotai distiller looking at new marketing ideas and business growth – Corporate governance, branding and intellectual property rights (…yes, as a home brewer, I’m quite excited about this one )

Guangxi University: A wide variety of items here, but a focus on developing an overall student career development strategy and how to infuse greater levels of innovation in the university curriculum.

More to come as I get geared up to head over to Nanning, and I welcome you to follow along in the journey…  Just click the sign up button  on the top right of the page.

Time Travel Query: Enabling you to jump in and out of time

At the Gartner conference last week, we had breakfast with analyst Merv Adrian. As it was the day of announce for our InfoSphere Warehouse 10 and DB2 10 offerings much of our discussion rallied around some of the new features. One key area that we spent time on was that of the newly incorporated ‘Time Travel Query’. Merv’s recommendation was to leverage a Dr. Who theme at our yearly Information on Demand Conference and to be honest, I think that would be an awesome idea.

The Time Travel Query function allows you to query data as it was at any point in the past, or as it will be at some point in the future.

Say that again?

The Time Travel Query function allows you to query data as it was at any point in the past, or as it will be at some point in the future.

Ok, perhaps Dr. Who is already here

The Time Travel Query (based on the SQL 2011 standard) is integrated into the database engine to provide significant performance and manageability advantages. This leads to easier business historical and trend analysis and application development. Time Travel Query provides the infrastructure for time-aware analytics to reduce the operational complexity of collecting and analyzing time-based data. This accelerates dynamic analysis of business trends and changes over time, for both new and existing applications.

The Time Travel Query also provides the flexibility to play with  system-controlled temporal data, enabling you to analyze all kinds of chronological data including forward-looking data when using user-controlled temporal data. Having this query baked in to the database reduces  application development time by allowing DBAs to use an existing SQL application and run it across different time periods.,..it is optimized for meeting audit and compliance inquires and point-in-time queries without the burden of changing an application

Time Travel Query functionality is included in all InfoSphere Warehouse editions editions.

To net it out – We have prebaked native support for temporal analytics into the database engine – Allowing you to jump back in and out of time periods as needed.

Perhaps if we combine with multidimensional cubes, InfoSphere Warehouse would make a more reliable TARDIS.

Eat that, Time Lords

InfoSphere Warehouse 10 – The Real-Time Data Warehouse

So back to the grind – I’ve been away from the blogging and tweeting a bit for a number of good reasons, but the backlog of activities and news to share is staggering.

On a personal note, my wife and I had our 2nd child recently and well to be quite frank – That really kills the ability to crank out early morning or late night blog entries and such. I’m still in a half awake trance right now, in between burps, shooshes and fast walks around the foyer to get the Lil Mr. to sleep.

Last week I was out at the Gartner BI conference in Los Angeles, CA – Much more activity this year in my honest opinion and spoke with a number of current and prospective customers on their current BI and data warehousing situations. What really surprised me this year is that many folks are coming in asking about specific products and how it can help their company or organization – Marketing appears to be paying off – Yet we must be diligent to fully understanding the underlying business drivers before offering a solution. Will cover this in another post.

On top of the conference, our team launched our latest InfoSphere Warehouse 10 offering (in tandem with DB2 10) and has been getting some great reception. Now, I’m not going to spend all day recreating the wheel on its laundry list of features and benefits (there are plenty of sites that cover this that I will list) but I do want to discuss it’s overall purpose and why we released it.

Now if you were not aware, InfoSphere Warehouse 10 is built on top of DB2 (and thus DB2 10). This is the underlying database. What makes InfoSphere Warehouse different from DB2 proper is a feature known as the ‘database partitioning feature’ (or DPF for short) – This feature allows the DB2 10 inside of InfoSphere Warehouse to partition across nodes, increasing performance, manageability, scalabiltiy, etc. – All things important with a data warehouse implementation. This feature is not the only difference though, as InfoSphere Warehouse also includes its own data mining, cubing services, Cognos reporting and even basic ETL baked-in as standard components.

So with all of that being said – What is the big deal with InfoSphere Warehouse 10?

Real-Time Data Warehousing

From continuous ingest (populating the data warehouse on a continuous basis – as events occur) through time travel queries (baked-in support for temporal analytics) this data warehouse version enables customers to shorten the time it takes to record and capture an event, analyze and incorporate it and then take action on it.

Take this scenario. You are a retail store. A customer calls in (or emails, etc) to tell you that they are dissatisfied with your service. In the past, you would potentially deal with this customer in a customer service department individually and then ‘log’ and ‘update’ the customer’s complaint whenever the data warehouse loading was to occur (could be daily, could be weekly). While the customer service department handler has access to this ‘event’ (the customer complaining) – The rest of your organization and the underlying data warehouse and analytics infrastructure does not. How are you going to respond?  Even analytical competitors have to wait until that event is loaded and processed before being able to respond.

Enter InfoSphere Warehouse 10. When the customer calls in, instead of having to wait until a batch load occurs, the specific event is ‘ingested’ into the data warehouse on the spot and incorporated into the repository. You have essentially reduced the time it takes to leverage that information from days and weeks to near immediate response. Your data warehouse is using the latest information, immediately after the events occur.

Continuous ingest in InfoSphere Warehouse 10 is an awesome illustration of some of the real-time capabilities yet the features don’t stop there. This offering is jam packed with built in queries, security features and other tools that drive higher performance, lower costs and increase overall team productivity.

I’ll follow up on some of the specific features over the next few days (yes, I promise to be better with writing) , but in the meantime, check out this aggregator of warehousing news for some other expert opinions, thoughts and critiques on the new InfoSphere Warehouse:

https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/datawarehousing/?lang=en_us