During the last three years, enterprises have sought for the first time to make sense of the phrase, real-time enterprise. The idea is to create IT infrastructure that enables any member of the organization, at any time, to detect key new events (occurring inside or outside the enterprise) and react to them immediately with the appropriate decision and action.
It turns out that this is easier said than done. However, there is a new combination of technologies that can reverse the trend to data feudalization -- a combination that Infostructure Associates calls the virtual operational store (VOS). What is a VOS? How can it help? And how can DB2 play a role in implementing a VOS?
The problem with present real-time enterprise strategies.
While definitions of real-time enterprise (RTE) abound, they have in common these characteristics:
In other words, the prescription for becoming an RTE is seductively simple:
Just like that.
But this RTE strategy is surprisingly likely to result in long-term failure:
Meanwhile, RFID has begun to loose a flood of new time-critical data on Wal-Mart and its competitors, not to mention increasing use of data from extra-enterprise sources such as information from suppliers or customers, or even Web services that provide real-time information such as commodity prices, interest rates, or even weather.
By creating a virtual operational store (VOS), IT avoids the major problems with a typical RTE strategy:
The Nature of a Virtual Operational Store
A VOS is a relatively small amount of fast-access operational data that allows the system to deliver, on average, 90% of the performance speed of an ideal on-demand cross-enterprise database.
VOS harks back to the idea of virtual memory. Virtual memory provides a cache of fast main memory to front a much larger (by 1-3 orders of magnitude) disk storage area. When the processor in a computer accesses the main memory and finds that the data it ne
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eds is not there, it places some of the data in main memory on disk (swaps it out), accesses the disk to get the data it needs, loads that data into main memory (swaps it in), and then proceeds. By using sophisticated rules of thumb, the computer can ensure that the data it needs is in memory and therefore the computer will perform at 90% or more of its potential performance if all of the disk storage had been main memory instead. The old joke about virtual memory is to cup your empty hands and say "I have in my hands ten terabytes of virtual memory" because, effectively, the system acts as if all of storage was main memory.
In the same way, a virtual operational store aims to ensure that, most of the time, key data that is likely to be accessed on demand is available in the data store and can be retrieved at speeds comparable to that of a major popular database or faster, because an ODS is optimized for just such a situation. To achieve this, the VOS uses rules of thumb for swapping in and swapping out similar to the virtual-memory approach:
In order to carry out its tasks, a VOS must therefore include:
State of the Art in VOSs
Where is the technology to support the VOS and the virtual RTE? It certainly is not in today's major data-warehouse solutions alone. These are often topping out and proliferating with no clear solution (despite the promise of grid computing) in sight. Moreover, these solutions are relational (optimized for structured data) and do not adapt easily to handling the increasing percentage of unstructured and semi-structured operational data, nor to storing XML's complex data types.
The technologies that offer real promise of solving upcoming RTE problems are EII tools and ODSs -- that is, an EII solution and an ODS specifically designed to handle a wide range of operational data, to scale, and to add new data sources and types semi-automatically. Separately, these two technologies have already proven themselves to be highly useful to the savvy enterprise. Together, they can deliver all the benefits of the separate products plus VOS capabilities that will enable long-term enterprise success in achieving the virtual real-time enterprise.
The Benefits of a VOS for the Real-Time Enterprise
The first benefit of a VOS is that it makes the real-time enterprise far more feasible. Therefore, a VOS should typically enable all the key benefits of an RTE:
Second, a VOS delivers significant side-effect benefits. For example:
Third, if a VOS includes EII and ODS capabilities, it can deliver all the benefits that these technologies have already provided in the real world.
VOS and MDM
The smart reader will have already noted a surprising architectural similarity between a VOS and an MDM implementation. The VOS stores information about key data in a central repository; so does MDM. MDM typically stores part of that data in the repository and leaves part of it in existing data stores; so does the VOS. The key difference is that MDM focuses on access to master data; the VOS focuses on real-time access to actionable data of whatever type.
Table 1: Ways to use a VOS in key IT tasks
[TABLE]
Infostructure Associates, December 2005
Nevertheless, the similarity of MDM and VOS means that users have an additional attractive option in implementing a VOS: first implement MDM, and then extend the scope of the data covered to all actionable data instead of just master data.
DB2's Uses in a VOS
The similarity between MDM and a VOS also means that DB2 can play the same roles as in MDM:
However, within these general roles, DB2's tasks will be slightly different.
Cache database
IBM DB2 can be a highly useful cache database, for two reasons. First, it is able to deliver high performance for the relational format typical of common-format master data, while handling the more atypical semi-structured (text) and unstructured (graphics) that may occur. Second, it is well integrated with strong ETL, EII (Information Integrator), EAI (Ascential), and replication products, allowing high-performance conversion and transmission of data.
A VOS will typically have a higher proportion of semi-structured and unstructured data than MDM; so the XML and XQuery capabilities of DB2 will be more important to a VOS. Moreover, performance and scalability is of greater importance to a VOS than to MDM, because users want as large a proportion of the enterprise's actionable data in the central/cache database as possible for faster decision-making.
Metadata repository
Again, DB2 can be a highly effective way to implement a metadata repository. Its scalability, robustness, and long experience with data dictionaries (per-database metadata repositories) make it a logical choice. Also, it is well integrated with Information Integrator, so that it can use Integrator's ability to semi-automatically go out and search for master data no matter what the data type, initially populate the metadata repository, and update the repository as new customer record types arrive at local sites.
A VOS's metadata repository must be more flexible in handling wide varieties of data types. Thus, DB2's XML storage capabilities are of high importance to the user.
Conclusions
Today, a VOS is not as important to a CEO as MDM, because while every CEO sees the importance of leveraging key customer or supplier data as much as possible, few see the real-time enterprise as more than a very long-term goal. Nevertheless, a virtual real-time enterprise is achievable much sooner than that -- and that it can be just as valuable as MDM. To prove the point, ask the CEO why today's popular dashboards can't show all the data that the CEO or CFO needs to see, and then point out that a VOS would solve that problem. And, of course, a VOS is less difficult to implement than MDM, because there is no requirement that all central data be stored in a common format, and therefore no need for enforcement committees.
So whatever happens with MDM, a VOS is valuable and doable. In fact, at a more small-scale level, suppliers such as Ipedo are already implementing VOSs. What DB2 brings to the table is IBM's clout, IBM's services, integration with Information Integrator (and replication), and the scalability of an enterprise database. In other words, DB2 and friends can be a natural fit for the VOS needs of many enterprises.
About the author: Wayne Kernochan is president of Infostructure Associates, LLC, a Lexington, Mass.-based analyst firm.
