Abstract
There is enormous pressure today for businesses across all industries to cut costs, enhance business performance, and deliver greater value with fewer resources. To take business analytics to the next level and drive tangible improvements to the bottom line, it is important to manage not only the volume of data, but the speed with which actionable findings can be drawn from a wide variety of disparate sources. The findings must be easily communicated to those responsible for making both strategic and tactical decisions. At the same time, strained IT budgets require that the solution be self-service for everyone from DBAs to business users, and easily deployed to thin, browser-based clients.
Business analytics hosted in the Query Management Facility™ (QMF™) on DB2® and System z® allow you to tackle these challenges in a practical way, using new features and functions that are easily deployed across the enterprise and easily consumed by business users who do not have prior IT experience. This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides step-by-step instructions on using these new features:
- Access to data that resides in any JDBC-compliant data source
- OLAP access through XMLA
- 150+ new analytical functions
- Graphical query interfaces and graphical reports
- Graphical, interactive dashboards
- Ability to integrate QMF functions with third-party applications
- Support for the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator
- A new QMF Classic perspective in QMF for Workstation
- Ability to start QMF for TSO as a DB2 for z/OS stored procedure
- New metadata capabilities, including ER diagrams and capability to federate data into a single virtual source
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Assessing business analytics solutions
Chapter 2. Business analytics from the ground up - Hardware, data modeling, and data warehousing
Chapter 3. DB2 for z/OS as an analytics engine
Chapter 4. Maximizing your existing System z investment
Chapter 5. Installing QMF for Workstation and WebSphere and touring the interfaces
Chapter 6. Configuring access to data sources and populating users' workspaces
Chapter 7. Defining virtual data sources to reduce complexity for business users
Chapter 8. Configuring security
Chapter 9. Getting to the data you need - Query methods
Chapter 10. Updating data with QMF's table editor
Chapter 11. Creating reports
Chapter 12. Working with procedures
Chapter 13. Analysis and forecasting functions
Chapter 14. Putting it all together - Developing dashboards
Chapter 15. Deploying created content to QMF users
Appendix A. Analytical functions available in the Expression Designer