Dimensional Modeling: In a Business Intelligence Environment


Book Description

In this IBM Redbooks publication we describe and demonstrate dimensional data modeling techniques and technology, specifically focused on business intelligence and data warehousing. It is to help the reader understand how to design, maintain, and use a dimensional model for data warehousing that can provide the data access and performance required for business intelligence. Business intelligence is comprised of a data warehousing infrastructure, and a query, analysis, and reporting environment. Here we focus on the data warehousing infrastructure. But only a specific element of it, the data model - which we consider the base building block of the data warehouse. Or, more precisely, the topic of data modeling and its impact on the business and business applications. The objective is not to provide a treatise on dimensional modeling techniques, but to focus at a more practical level. There is technical content for designing and maintaining such an environment, but also business content. For example, we use case studies to demonstrate how dimensional modeling can impact the business intelligence requirements for your business initiatives. In addition, we provide a detailed discussion on the query aspects of BI and data modeling. For example, we discuss query optimization and how you can determine performance of the data model prior to implementation. You need a solid base for your data warehousing infrastructure . . . . a solid data model.




Building IBM


Book Description

No company of the twentieth century achieved greater success and engendered more admiration, respect, envy, fear, and hatred than IBM. Building IBM tells the story of that company—how it was formed, how it grew, and how it shaped and dominated the information processing industry. Emerson Pugh presents substantial new material about the company in the period before 1945 as well as a new interpretation of the postwar era.Granted unrestricted access to IBM's archival records and with no constraints on the way he chose to treat the information they contained, Pugh dispels many widely held myths about IBM and its leaders and provides new insights on the origins and development of the computer industry.Pugh begins the story with Herman Hollerith's invention of punched-card machines used for tabulating the U.S. Census of 1890, showing how Hollerith's inventions and the business he established provided the primary basis for IBM. He tells why Hollerith merged his company in 1911 with two other companies to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which changed its name in 1924 to International Business Machines. Thomas J. Watson, who was hired in 1914 to manage the merged companies, exhibited remarkable technological insight and leadership—in addition to his widely heralded salesmanship—to build Hollerith's business into a virtual monopoly of the rapidly growing punched-card equipment business. The fascinating inside story of the transfer of authority from the senior Watson to his older son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., and the company's rapid domination of the computer industry occupy the latter half of the book. In two final chapters, Pugh examines conditions and events of the 1970s and 1980s and identifies the underlying causes of the severe probems IBM experienced in the 1990s.




The Decline and Fall of IBM


Book Description

IBM is in trouble in 2014. The iconic computer company has mismanaged itself into a rut it may be unable to get out of. Technology journalist Robert X. Cringely explains how Big Blue got to where it is today and what can still be done to save the company before it is too late.




Making the World Work Better


Book Description

Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company, journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien mark the Centennial of IBM’s founding by examining how IBM has distinctly contributed to the evolution of technology and the modern corporation over the past 100 years. The authors offer a fresh analysis through interviews of many key figures, chronicling the Nobel Prize-winning work of the company’s research laboratories and uncovering rich archival material, including hundreds of vintage photographs and drawings. The book recounts the company’s missteps, as well as its successes. It captures moments of high drama – from the bet-the-business gamble on the legendary System/360 in the 1960s to the turnaround from the company’s near-death experience in the early 1990s. The authors have shaped a narrative of discoveries, struggles, individual insights and lasting impact on technology, business and society. Taken together, their essays reveal a distinctive mindset and organizational culture, animated by a deeply held commitment to the hard work of progress. IBM engineers and scientists invented many of the building blocks of modern information technology, including the memory chip, the disk drive, the scanning tunneling microscope (essential to nanotechnology) and even new fields of mathematics. IBM brought the punch-card tabulator, the mainframe and the personal computer into the mainstream of business and modern life. IBM was the first large American company to pay all employees salaries rather than hourly wages, an early champion of hiring women and minorities and a pioneer of new approaches to doing business--with its model of the globally integrated enterprise. And it has had a lasting impact on the course of society from enabling the US Social Security System, to the space program, to airline reservations, modern banking and retail, to many of the ways our world today works. The lessons for all businesses – indeed, all institutions – are powerful: To survive and succeed over a long period, you have to anticipate change and to be willing and able to continually transform. But while change happens, progress is deliberate. IBM – deliberately led by a pioneering culture and grounded in a set of core ideas – came into being, grew, thrived, nearly died, transformed itself... and is now charting a new path forward for its second century toward a perhaps surprising future on a planetary scale.




Security in Development: The IBM Secure Engineering Framework


Book Description

IBM® has long been recognized as a leading provider of hardware, software, and services that are of the highest quality, reliability, function, and integrity. IBM products and services are used around the world by people and organizations with mission-critical demands for high performance, high stress tolerance, high availability, and high security. As a testament to this long-standing attention at IBM, demonstration of this attention to security can be traced back to the Integrity Statement for IBM mainframe software, which was originally published in 1973: IBM's long-term commitment to System Integrity is unique in the industry, and forms the basis of MVS (now IBM z/OS) industry leadership in system security. IBM MVS (now IBM z/OS) is designed to help you protect your system, data, transactions, and applications from accidental or malicious modification. This is one of the many reasons IBM 360 (now IBM Z) remains the industry's premier data server for mission-critical workloads. This commitment continues to apply to IBM's mainframe systems and is reiterated at the Server RACF General User's Guide web page. The IT market transformed in 40-plus years, and so have product development and information security practices. The IBM commitment to continuously improving product security remains a constant differentiator for the company. In this IBM RedguideTM publication, we describe secure engineering practices for software products. We offer a description of an end-to-end approach to product development and delivery, with security considered. IBM is producing this IBM Redguide publication in the hope that interested parties (clients, other IT companies, academics, and others) can find these practices to be a useful example of the type of security practices that are increasingly a must-have for developing products and applications that run in the world's digital infrastructure. We also hope this publication can enrich our continued collaboration with others in the industry, standards bodies, government, and elsewhere, as we seek to learn and continuously refine our approach.




Microservices from Theory to Practice: Creating Applications in IBM Bluemix Using the Microservices Approach


Book Description

Microservices is an architectural style in which large, complex software applications are composed of one or more smaller services. Each of these microservices focuses on completing one task that represents a small business capability. These microservices can be developed in any programming language. They communicate with each other using language-neutral protocols, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), or messaging applications, such as IBM® MQ Light. This IBM Redbooks® publication gives a broad understanding of this increasingly popular architectural style, and provides some real-life examples of how you can develop applications using the microservices approach with IBM BluemixTM. The source code for all of these sample scenarios can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/). The book also presents some case studies from IBM products. We explain the architectural decisions made, our experiences, and lessons learned when redesigning these products using the microservices approach. Information technology (IT) professionals interested in learning about microservices and how to develop or redesign an application in Bluemix using microservices can benefit from this book.




Using the IBM Block Storage CSI Driver in a Red Hat OpenShift Environment


Book Description

RedHat OpenShift container platform is one of the leading enterprise-grade container orchestration platforms. It is designed for rapid deployment of web applications, databases, and microservices. Categorized as a container orchestration Platform as a Service (PaaS), it is based on open industry standards, such as the Container Runtime Interface - Open (CRI-O) and Kubernetes. OpenShift allow developers to focus on the code, while the platform manages the complex IT operations and processes. Although open-source, community-driven container orchestration platforms are available, such as OKD and Kubernetes, this IBM® Redpaper® publication focuses on Red Hat OpenShift. It describes the basic concepts of OpenShift persistent storage architecture and its integration into IBM Cloud® Paks. The deployment of the IBM block storage CSI driver also is discussed. This publication also describes the concepts, technology and current working practices for installing the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for Kubernetes to use IBM Enterprise Storage platforms for persistent storage coupled with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). This publication also provides an overview of containers, Kubernetes, and Openshift for context (it is expected that the reader has a working knowledge of these underlying technologies). It also includes architectural examples of the orchestration platform will be given. This paper serves as a guide about how to deploy the CSI driver for block storage by using the DS8000® and Spectrum Virtualize platforms as persistent storage in a Red Hat OpenShift platform. The publication is intended for storage administrators, IT architects, OpenShift technical specialists and anyone who wants to integrate IBM Enterprise storage on OpenShift V4.3/4.4/4.5 on IBM Power, IBM Z®, and x86 systems.




IBM and the Corruption of Justice in America


Book Description

The dreadful, shocking truth of America's corrupt federal courts is finally exposed. The story the media covers up and will not tell the American people. The author spent four years representing himself in civil lawsuits against IBM and the United States government. By representing himself, he was able to penetrate the barrier of mystique and complexity which shields the operation of the corrupt judicial system from non-lawyers. The book clearly show how Federal judges routinely commit and cover-up criminal offenses with the full knowledge and blessing of both the Department of Justice and Congress. In plain, simple English the book takes the reader on a terrifying insider's tour of the operation of the federal courts, the Department of Justice, and Congress. This book is an easy to read chronicle of one man's personal crusade against tyranny.




Storwize HyperSwap with IBM i


Book Description

IBM® Storwize® HyperSwap® is a response to increasing demand for continuous application availability, minimizing downtime in the event of an outage, and non disruptive migrations. IT centers with IBM i can take full advantage of the HyperSwap solution. In this IBM RedpaperTM publication, we provide instructions to implement Storwize HyperSwap with IBM i. We also describe some business continuity scenarios in this area, including solutions with HyperSwap and IBM i Live Partition Mobility, and a solution with HyperSwap and IBM PowerHA® for IBM i.




IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity: Featuring Power Enterprise Pools 2.0


Book Description

This IBM® Redbooks® publication is a guide to IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity featuring Power Enterprise Pools (PEP) 2.0. This technology enables multiple servers in an to share base processor and memory resources and draw on pre-paid credits when the base is exceeded. Previously, the Shared Utility Capacity feature supported IBM Power E950 (9040-MR9) and IBM Power E980 (9080-M9S). The feature was extended in August 2020 to include the scale-out IBM Power servers that were announced on 14 July 2020, and it received dedicated processor support later in the year. The IBM Power S922 (9009-22G), and IBM Power S924 (9009-42G) servers, which use the latest IBM POWER9TM processor-based technology and support the IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux operating systems (OSs), are now supported. The previous scale-out models of Power S922 (9009-22A), and Power S924 (9009-42A) servers cannot be added to an enterprise pool. With the availability of the IBM Power E1080 (9080-HEX) in September 2021, support for this system as part of a Shared Utility Pool has become available. The goal of this book is to provide an overview of the solution's environment and guidance for planning a deployment of it. The book also covers how to configure IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity. There are also chapters about migrating from PEP 1.0 to PEP 2.0 and various use cases. This publication is for professionals who want to acquire a better understanding of IBM Power Systems Private Cloud, and Shared Utility Capacity. The intended audience includes: Clients Sales and marketing professionals Technical support professionals IBM Business Partners This book expands the set of IBM Power documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity.