The world is becoming more and more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent in what IBM® terms a smarter planet, with more and more data being collected for analysis. In trade magazines, this trend is called big data. As part of this trend, the following types of time-based information are collected: Large data centers support a corporation or provide cloud services. These data centers need to collect temperature, humidity, and other types of information over time to optimize energy usage. Utility meters (referred to as smart meters) allow utility companies to collect information over a wireless network and to collect more data than ever before. IBM Informix® TimeSeries is optimized for the processing of time-based data and can provide the following benefits: Storage savings: Storage can be optimized when you know the characteristics of your time-based data. Informix TimeSeries often uses one third of the storage space that is required by a standard relational database. Query performance: Informix TimeSeries takes into consideration the type of data to optimize its organization on disk and eliminates the need for some large indexes and additional sorting. For these reasons and more, some queries can easily have an order of magnitude performance improvement compared to standard relational. Simpler queries: Informix TimeSeries includes a large set of specialized functions that allow you to better express the processing that you want to execute. It even provides a toolkit so that you can add proprietary algoritms to the library. This IBM Redbooks® publication is for people who want to implement a solution that revolves around time-based data. It gives you the information that you need to get started and be productive with Informix TimeSeries.

For more than 20 years, Network World has been the premier provider of information, intelligence and insight for network and IT executives responsible for the digital nervous systems of large organizations. Readers are responsible for designing, implementing and managing the voice, data and video systems their companies use to support everything from business critical applications to employee collaboration and electronic commerce.

IBM® Informix® is a low-administration, easy-to-use, and embeddable database that is ideal for application development. It supports a wide range of development platforms, such as JavaTM, .NET, PHP, and web services, enabling developers to build database applications in the language of their choice. Informix is designed to handle RDBMS data and XML without modification and can be extended easily to handle new data sets. This IBM Redbooks® publication provides fundamentals of Informix application development. It covers the Informix Client installation and configuration for application development environments. It discusses the skills and techniques for building Informix applications with Java, ESQL/C, OLE DB, .NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, DataBlade®, and Hibernate. The book uses code examples to demonstrate how to develop an Informix application with various drivers, APIs, and interfaces. It also provides application development troubleshooting and considerations for performance. This book is intended for developers who use IBM Informix for application development. Although some of the topics that we discuss are highly technical, the information in the book might also be helpful for managers or database administrators who are looking to better understand their Informix development environment.

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.

IBM® InfoSphere® Warehouse is the IBM flagship data warehouse platform for departmental data marts and enterprise data warehouses. It offers leading architecture, performance, backup, and recovery tools that help improve efficiency and reduce time to market through increased understanding of current data assets, while simplifying the daily operations of managing complex warehouse deployments. InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Enterprise Edition delivers an enhanced set of database performance, management, and design tools. These tools assist companies in maintaining and increasing value from their warehouses, while helping to reduce the total cost of maintaining these complex environments. In this IBM Redbooks® publication we explain how you can build a business intelligence system with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Enterprise to manage and support daily business operations for an enterprise, to generate more income with lower cost. We describe the foundation of the business analytics, the Data Warehouse features and functions, and the solutions that can deliver immediate analytics solutions and help you drive better business outcomes. We show you how to use the advanced analytics of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Enterprise Edition and integrated tools for data modeling, mining, text analytics, and identifying and meeting the data latency requirements. We describe how the performance and storage optimization features can make building and managing a large data warehouse more affordable, and how they can help significantly reduce the cost of ownership. We also cover data lifecycle management and the key features of IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence. This book is intended for data warehouse professionals who are interested in gaining in-depth knowledge about the operational business intelligence solution for a data warehouse that the IBM InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Enterprise Edition offers.

For more than 40 years, Computerworld has been the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide. Computerworld's award-winning Web site (Computerworld.com), twice-monthly publication, focused conference series and custom research form the hub of the world's largest global IT media network.

Distributed Infrastructure Support For E-Commerce And Distributed Applications is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms fail to adequately cope with resource control needs of the application designer in these three cases: -An electronic commerce framework for software leasing over the World Wide Web; -A remote building energy management system that has been experimentally deployed on several building sites; -A wireless computing infrastructure for efficient data transfer to non-stationary mobile clients that have been experimentally validated.

Data mining of massive data sets is transforming the way we think about crisis response, marketing, entertainment, cybersecurity and national intelligence. Collections of documents, images, videos, and networks are being thought of not merely as bit strings to be stored, indexed, and retrieved, but as potential sources of discovery and knowledge, requiring sophisticated analysis techniques that go far beyond classical indexing and keyword counting, aiming to find relational and semantic interpretations of the phenomena underlying the data. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis examines the frontier of analyzing massive amounts of data, whether in a static database or streaming through a system. Data at that scale-terabytes and petabytes-is increasingly common in science (e.g., particle physics, remote sensing, genomics), Internet commerce, business analytics, national security, communications, and elsewhere. The tools that work to infer knowledge from data at smaller scales do not necessarily work, or work well, at such massive scale. New tools, skills, and approaches are necessary, and this report identifies many of them, plus promising research directions to explore. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis discusses pitfalls in trying to infer knowledge from massive data, and it characterizes seven major classes of computation that are common in the analysis of massive data. Overall, this report illustrates the cross-disciplinary knowledge-from computer science, statistics, machine learning, and application disciplines-that must be brought to bear to make useful inferences from massive data.

Time and Relational Theory provides an in-depth description of temporal database systems, which provide special facilities for storing, querying, and updating historical and future data. Traditionally, database management systems provide little or no special support for temporal data at all. This situation is changing because: - Cheap storage enables retention of large volumes of historical data in data warehouses - Users are now faced with temporal data problems, and need solutions - Temporal features have recently been incorporated into the SQL standard, and vendors have begun to add temporal support to their DBMS products Based on the groundbreaking text Temporal Data & the Relational Model (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002) and new research led by the authors, Time and Relational Theory is the only book to offer a complete overview of the functionality of a temporal DBMS. Expert authors Nikos Lorentzos, Hugh Darwen, and Chris Date describe an approach to temporal database management that is firmly rooted in classical relational theory and will stand the test of time. This book covers the SQL:2011 temporal extensions in depth and identifies and discusses the temporal functionality still missing from SQL. - Understand how the relational model provides an ideal basis for taming the complexities of temporal databases - Learn how to analyze and evaluate commercial temporal products with this timely and important information - Be able to use sound principles in designing and using temporal databases - Understand the temporal support recently added to SQL with coverage of the new SQL features in this unique, accurate, and authoritative reference - Appreciate the benefits of a truly relational approach to the problem with this clear, user friendly presentation