Using VISION Products to Support Your Data Warehouse Projects
Article ID: 56105
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
Can the Vision suite of tools support data warehouse projects?
Resolution
There has been a resurgence of data warehouse interest and with that a renewed evaluation of business intelligence information and how it can be better used by all within the company. The emphasis has also been to use the mainframe as the primary repository for this information. The mainframe has historically provided reliability, scalability, speed, security, and is now more cost effective than ever before.
The basic premise of data warehousing is to consolidate information into one or more central location(s). Selected contents of this information, called "data marts", are subsets of this data and used by specific users depending on their business needs. The data mart can be populated directly from the data warehouse or from other sources. If data is only required for one data mart, it would be more efficient to add the data directly to that data mart rather than go through a major conversion of adding it to the data warehouse.
Whether you are building a new data warehouse, establishing data marts or developing applications to maintain the data structures, a fallacy for many companies has been to look for new tools to do the processing, forgetting about the tools already in the company's software inventory. The tools must be simple and easy to use and require minimum effort to code. The tools must be able to do the work whether the data warehouse is a simple or a very complex structure that could involve hundreds of gigabytes of information. They must also be able to handle many different mainframe data sources. Tools must be able to satisfy end users' requirements such as simple reporting and querying, executive information systems, and data mining, to mention just a few. Keep in mind that the right tools can make or break a data warehouse implementation before it even gets off the ground.
When designing and building of a data warehouse, a key planning component of the architecture are the tools needed to do the extraction, sorting, cleansing, and loading of information. This should also include the necessary maintenance of the data warehouse to ensure the data is as current as possible.
VISION:Builder, VISION:Results, and VISION:Report are very powerful easy-to-use application development tools that can do the job and that you have probably used for many years. These software tools can be used for all facets of building your data warehouse, data mart, or when used in the data mining process, as an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool.
The VISION products were built to accommodate the processing of large volumes of information that are used for the initial extract, move, and load or ongoing maintenance. VISION:Results, VISION:Builder, and VISION:Report have the industrial strength to support all phases of building the data warehouse from start to the proverbial finish...but we know once it's in place the process to maintain the various repositories of your business-critical information will need to continue and is equally as important as building the warehouse.
The VISION products give programmers the coding strength of COBOL but with less effort so applications can be developed in far less time. Each has extensive data selection and handling to do reformatting, compares, arithmetic operation, decimal aligns, sorts, merges, intricate data manipulation, an easy to use report writer, and much more.
Then there are data marts to build. The VISION tools can play an excellent role in building subsets of data customized to the end users requirements. The products were designed and developed to minimize the learning time to be proficient in their use and still have the power to satisfy all the requirements of supporting the data warehouse.
Data that is stored in IMS, DB2, IDMS, VSAM and other data structures can easily be accessed by any of these products without in-depth knowledge of the APIs. They are able to send reports to a browser and, in a future release, will provide XML formatted output.
For performing queries online and moving data from the mainframe to a Windows workstation VISION:Inform, VISION:Inquiry, and the Intraccess client will round out the necessary software you will need for most data warehouse applications. With a combination of these tools the data warehouse isn't such a daunting effort and will probably keep your project on schedule or may even bring it in early. Regardless if you are using experienced developers or bringing in new programmers the VISION software will allow for a speedy implementation of new data warehouses and quick and easy code changes as business processes change.
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