SO RELIABLE

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SO RELIABLE

• Iain Bray
• Sales Engineer
• InterSystems Corporation

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What Is Knowledge Management?

• Increasing customer/partner/employee knowledge
• Rapid learning and redeployment of knowledge
• Increasing the value of intellectual property
• Adding unique values in products and services
• Creating new knowledge
• Sharing knowledge of work processes and
  innovations

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The Problem

• All organisations have a vast store of useful
  information
• In disparate systems
• Intelligent structures and common indices help
  but
• If its not a common question then the answer can
  take a while
• Indices use different names
• Data is stored in a different context
• No lack of information just a lack of time to
  look at it!

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What Do You Have To Do?

• Collaborate
• Bringing together the disparate systems
• Search and Deliver
• Find the right information and tune-out the rest

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Where Are We (Typically)
Complexity Scalability x Type of Use
Highest Performance, Most Scalable SQL for TP
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Collaboration (Joined Up Information)

• Relational Gateway
• Projection of ODBC compliant databases as Caché
  Objects
• COM Gateway
• Interface with COM applications through Caché
  Objects
• XML
• Data and definition transfer with other
  applications
• EJB
• Application Server Support
• Currently BEA Weblogic, JBoss, Borland
  Application Server
• IBM MQ Series
• Support for message systems

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Making Life Easier (Why Objects?)

• Relational Databases
• Typically need two databases
• Live database
• Report database
• Two different database schemas
• More indices on the report database for better
  search speed
• Less indices on the live database for transaction
  speed
• Synchronisation problems
• Housekeeping and update problems
• Data not immediately available for reporting
• Adding object view is complex, costly and
  difficult to maintain

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Making Life Easier (Why Objects?)

• Object Database
• Only one schema
• Online data instead of batch
• Applications are smarter because of
  availability of data
• Business logic built into data structure instead
  of being added on

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Joined Up Data

• Optimal storage mechanism
• Foundation for rich projections of the data
• Provides quick and easy access via industry
  standard APIs

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Whats Coming Next

• Embracing OLAP as well as OLTP
• Bit Map Indices
• Functionality in the product for a long time
• Now being integrated with SQL
• Performance improved
• MDX (Multidimensional Expressions)
• Data cube creation and query

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Bit Map Indices

• Extraordinarily quick boolean expressions
• AND, OR, XOR etc.
• Find all men whos credit rating is A and live
  in Slough
• sexM AND creditA AND postcodeSL
• Automatic creation and querying built into Caché
  4.2

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MDX Multidimensional Expressions

• Microsoft
• A highly functional expression syntax for
  querying multidimensional data
• OLAP Services supports MDX functions as a full
  language implementation for creating and querying
  cube data
• Functions for creating and querying cube data
• SELECT Measures.MEMBERS ON COLUMNS,
• Store.MEMBERS ON ROWSFROM Sales

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Data Cubes

• Caché data is already stored as sparse arrays
• Dont necessarily need to create separate data
  cube
• Sparse arrays more efficient than data cubes
• No redundant data

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Making Life Simple

• Software developers understand their customers
  business models
• They need a database structure that will not
  frustrate the development of solutions for their
  customers
• Power and robustness through the sophisticated
  multidimensional data array
• Easy to exploit

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Accelerating Innovation

• Always a strong database
• Exploited and understood by professional
  developers
• Ever increasing number of access methods
• Attracting new customers
• Increasingly innovative applications
• Professional developers finding it easy to
  convert their ideas into practise

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Summary

• Enabling the developer
• Collaboration
• Retrieval
• Delivery
• Quick and Easy to develop and maintain
• Quicker to market
• Fewer development costs
• More profit