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December 17, 2009

Scalability Done Your Way

Analytics and data warehousing environments are growing by leaps and bounds — and often in unpredictable directions. Sometimes you need to add storage, sometimes computing power, and sometimes you need to increase the number of users accessing the system.

Sybase IQ multiplex is a highly scalable shared disk grid technology that allows concurrent data loads and queries via independent data processing nodes connected to a shared data source.

With the Sybase IQ Multiplex Grid Option, you can start with one server and add CPUs and memory as needed. You can add servers and CPUs with little or no loss in scalability, plus you can add terabytes of disk to the SAN, independent of adding server hardware, with no significant performance degradation. Sybase IQ multiplex supports multiple users per CPU. With the Multiplex Grid Option, you can add more flexibility and power to your environment by dynamically specifying read and write nodes.

 

This option enables you to incrementally scale-out concurrent query jobs, load jobs, or both. You can specify Sybase IQ servers as reader or writer nodes across multiple server machines connected to an array of shared SAN (storage area network) disks via high-speed interconnect. The ability to specify nodes as reader or writer enables you to flexibly scale your environment as needed.

The Sybase IQ multiplex architecture allows for addition of servers independent of addition of storage capacity. The servers may be heterogeneous with respect to the number of CPUs; i.e., different servers in the Sybase IQ Multiplex may contain varying number of CPUs.

Sybase IQ multiplex supports a hybrid cluster architecture that uses shared storage for permanent Sybase IQ data and independent node storage for catalog metadata, temporary data, and transaction logs. This architecture enables you to manage large workloads using multiple nodes. With Sybase IQ multiplex, you can load data from multiple writer nodes and allow shared database objects written by one user to be queried by multiple users simultaneously.

Reader nodes can run read-only operations against shared Sybase IQ objects and writer nodes can run read-only and read-write operations against shared Sybase IQ objects. By licensing secondary nodes (the first server node does not require a multiplex option license), you make your Sybase IQ environment more scalable and highly adaptable to rapidly changing requirements. Each writer node can perform read-write operations when you require additional data load capability, and read-only operations when you require additional query capability. This option provides linear, incremental scalability to your analytics environment. And when deployed on a grid of low cost servers it provides tremendous value in performance and scalability at a fraction of the cost of a large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system. This scalability does not come at the cost of manageability. As shown below, the intuitive Sybase Central graphical user interface makes adding, removing, and monitoring nodes— essentially the entire administration of the environment—a matter of a few mouse clicks.

Performance, economy, and scalability done your way — it’s all there with Sybase IQ Multiplex. Learn more here.

Posted by Sybase IQ at 11:32 PM

December 14, 2009

Tomorrow, 12/15: Join an Online BI and Analytics Event with Forrester, Gartner, DM Radio and Sybase

Hello all, if you’re interested in Sybase IQ, BI or advanced analytics, you won’t want to miss ”Make Smarter Analytics a Reality”, tomorrow, online, via the web.

Gartner Group and Sybase will begin the event with “BI and Analytics: Does Excellence Always Equal Expensive?” presented by Gartner’s Andy Bitterer and Sybase’s VP and CTO, Irfan Khan.

Forrester and DM Radio will continue the event with “Advanced Analtyics in Practice” hosted by DM Radio’s Eric Kavanaugh and presented by Forrester Group’s Jim Kobielus.

With these online presentations are complete, the event will also provide you with an array of additional sessions, speakers, product demonstrations and access to online experts from Sybase throughout the day.

Best of all, you can attend any or all of the event from the convenience of from your desktop. To register, browse to the event registration page.

Bill Jacobs

Posted by Sybase IQ at 5:20 PM

December 4, 2009

Business Intelligence Reporting Tool included with Sybase WorkSpace

Hello and Happy Holidays!

The holidays are generous this year, as Sybase introduces BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool) into its toolkit bag of goodies.  WorkSpace is Sybase’s integrated tooling offering, that includes modeling, design and development tools, all hosted within the Eclipse open source framework. 

Now you have another useful tool in WorkSpace with BIRT.  BIRT is a reporting system, with data access, data transformation, and presentation features that integrates with your Java/J2EE application to produce compelling reports.  BIRT can access data from Sybase’s enterprise caliber servers – ASE for OLTP, and Sybase IQ for analytics, as well as any data sources with standard Java interfaces.  BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your application server.

If you have WorkSpace Data Analytics or WorkSpace Data Analytics Enterprise licensing, the BIRT report designer is automatically installed when you install Sybase WorkSpace 2.5. You can also download and install it from the Eclipse Web site.

With BIRT, you can add a rich variety of reports to your application (all pictures shown below are from the Eclipse BIRT web site: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/examples/solution/):

The basic content of a report is textual data: lists and crosstabs.  Lists of data can be sorted, grouped and aggregated with totals, averages and other summaries.  Crosstabs show data in two dimensions, such as sales per quarter or hits per web page:

You can add charts – graphical representations of data in the form of pie charts, line and bar charts (among others):

And it is easy to create form letters and other formal documents, such as invoices, with BIRT:

All of the reporting features described above can be combined into sophisticated ”compound reports” that really bring information to life and drive your message home.

So, add WorkSpace with BIRT to your gift list this year, and have a very merry and BI-eautiful holiday season!

Until later,

Courtney Claussen

Posted by Sybase IQ at 9:04 PM