[If you’re unfamiliar with benefits of Cubing Services, check out this short video.]

Since then, the team at IBM International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) have been working hard with our InfoSphere Warehouse experts to deliver new 2 free publications.

The first new publication is entitled “Enabling Robust Business Analytics with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services”.  Here’s the abstract:

In this IBM® Redguide™ publication, we describe how you can develop an environment that will enable you to perform more detailed analytics on your data and turn it into powerful information and business insight for making better informed decisions. Business decisions have historically been made primarily by analyzing data with techniques that limit you to a two dimensional view of that data. However, decisions are rarely defined or determined by such a narrow perspective. Now you can view and analyze your data from multiple perspectives – or dimensions as they are called in the technical world. We call this Multidimensional Analysis. With multidimensional analysis, you can extract significantly more business value from your data resources. We refer to that information as business intelligence. You can discover, for example, trends and patterns in the data that you might never have realized were there. And you can begin to really understand what variables truly impact your business. IBM has made it easier and gives you the tools to help you develop this capability and a significant business advantage.

[This publication is a Redguide.  Unlike a Redbook, which provides in-depth technical information and implementation guidance, a Redguide is shorter and focuses on the business view of technology.]

The second new publication is a Redbook entitled “Multidimensional Analytics: Delivered with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services”.  Here is the abstract:

In this IBM Redbooks publication, we discuss and describe a multidimensional data warehousing infrastructure that can enable solutions for complex problems in an efficient and effective manner. The focus of this infrastructure is the InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services Feature. With this feature, DB2 becomes the data store for large volumes of data that you can use to perform multidimensional analysis, which enables viewing complex problems from multiple perspectives, which provides more information for management business decision making. This feature supports analytic tool interfaces from powerful data analysis tools, such as Cognos 8 BI, Microsoft Excel, and Alphablox.

This is a significant capability that supports and enhances the analytics that clients use as they work to resolve problems with an ever growing scope, dimension, and complexity.

Analyzing problems by performing more detailed queries on the data and viewing the results from multiple perspectives yields significantly more information and insight. Building multidimensional cubes based on underlying DB2 relational tables, without having to move or replicate the data, enables significantly more powerful data analysis with less work and leads to faster problem resolution with the capability for more informed management decision making.

This capability is known as No Copy Analytics and is made possible with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services.

Here’s the chapter outline:

1. Introduction
2. A multidimensional infrastructure
3. The relational multidimensional model
4. Cubing services model implementation
5. Reporting solutions
6. Cubing services performance considerations
7. InfoSphere Warehouse on System z: Cubing Services

If so, you’ll definitely want to get a copy of the new IBM Redbook, InfoSphere Warehouse: Cubing Services and Client Access Interfaces.  Best of all, you can download the entire book for free.

Here’s the abstract below:

Formerly known as DB2® Warehouse, InfoSphere™ Warehouse enables a unified, powerful data warehousing environment. It provides access to structured and unstructured data, as well as operational and transactional data. In this IBM® Redbooks® publication, we provide a brief overview of InfoSphere Warehouse, but the primary objective is to discuss and describe the capabilities of one particular component of the InfoSphere Warehouse, which is InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services.

InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services is designed to provide a multidimensional view of data stored in relational databases, for significantly improved query and analysis capabilities. For this, there are particular schema designs that are typically used for these data warehouse and data mart databases, called dimensional, or cube, models. Optimization techniques are used to dramatically improve the performance of the OLAP queries, which are a core component of data warehousing and analytics.

InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services works with business intelligence (BI) tools, and clients, such as Cognos® , Alphablox, and Microsoft® Excel® , through client interfaces, to accelerate OLAP queries from many data sources. We describe these interfaces and provide examples of how to use them to improve the performance of your OLAP queries.

Here’s the chapter outline:

1. Introduction
2. The cubing lifecycle
3. Modeling using IBM InfoSphere Warehouse Design Studio
4. Creating the Cube Model
5. Designing Cubes
6. Deploying and managing the cube
7. Cube server performance
8. Using the Excel Client Interface
9. Cognos and the cube model
10. Using the Alphablox Client Interface
11. MDX Overview
12. Best Practices

IBM Redbooks are technical “how-to” guides.  The IBM International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) has been developing and publishing these popular guides for over 40 years.  To see more Redbooks, visit http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/.

If you’d like to get a taste of the concepts without opening your wallet, check out this video of David Allen speaking to Google employees.

There are only so many commercials for alarm systems, vacation getaways, and “once-in-a-lifetime” mattress sales that any man can take.  As a result, I’ve turned to listening to audio books and podcasts to pass the time during the commute.

Since a number of people have asked for recommendations, here are some of my favourites:

Audio Books

• For audio books, I’ve been using Audible for a number of years.   I believe they also provide audio books to Apple’s iTunes Store and to Amazon.com.
• For public domain audiobooks, check out Librivox.

Podcasts

• I’ve listened to every episode of Steve Gibson’s Security Now.
• Kevin and Alex from Diggnation always crack me up.
• Business Week offers a number of podcasts.
• The openculture blog has links to university lectures and speeches.
• IT Conversations
• Manager Tools

LibriVox is a great service for anyone that enjoys audiobooks, especially classics.  Here’s the description from the website:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

I noticed that iTunes lists Joseph Conrad’s unabridged Heart of Darkness audiobook for over CAD$ 20.  You can download it for free from LibriVox.

The horror, the horror, the horror…