 | Level: Introductory Pamela Siebert (psiebert@us.ibm.com), IDS Staff Software Test Engineer, IBM
Veronica Gomes (vgomes@us.ibm.com), IT Specialist, IDS Competitive Technologies and Enablement, IBM
Jing Shan (shanj@us.ibm.com), Warehousing Tools and Data Studio Software Developer, IBM
27 Apr 2009 The new IBM® Informix® Warehouse Feature provides
an integrated and simplified software platform to design and deploy a
warehouse repository on your existing IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS)
infrastructure. This tutorial, the beginning of a
series,
gives you a first look at the Informix Warehouse Feature and its components.
It will first introduce you to the context behind the new tools available and
the value they add in a data warehouse scenario based on Informix, and then,
it will give you a hands-on and example-driven view of the Informix Warehouse
Client component, the Design Studio, by going through the steps for creating a
simplified data warehouse and data extract-load-transform (ELT) project,
identifying the source and the target databases involved, and designing the
database physical model you have planned for your target Informix
warehouse.
Before you start
About this series
This tutorial
series,
Get started with Informix Warehouse Feature, introduces you
to the highlights and capabilities of the new client and server
software tools available for you in the Informix Warehouse option.
These tools enable you to create and deploy a project for modeling the
databases in your Informix data warehousing platform and automating
the data transformation and movement processes to easily acquire and
integrate data from different sources into your Informix
warehouse.
The tutorials in this series are organized following this line of
deployment: First, you will use the client component of the Informix
Warehouse software — the Design Studio — to create the
data warehouse (DW) project around Informix and build the data models
for source and target databases. Then, you will continue using Design
Studio to create and test the jobs for extracting, loading, and
transforming (ELT) data from various sources (typically, OLTP
databases and external files) into the target warehouse repository on
Informix. Finally, the series illustrates the use of the server
components in the Informix Warehouse — the Administration
Console and SQW services — to manage and monitor resources
associated to your warehouse, including the ELT jobs you programmed
before in Design Studio.
About this tutorial
This tutorial is the first part of the
Get started with Informix Warehouse Feature series.
Get an introduction to the Informix Warehouse option, and learn more
about its components and architecture. Review some of the main
concepts in data warehousing, and put the Informix Warehouse Feature
in context in a data warehousing solution using Informix. Set up and
follow an imaginary business scenario that will run the entire
tutorial series, where the Informix Warehouse Feature is used to
design and populate the new warehouse repository. Finally, start using
the Informix Warehouse: Get your hands on the Design Studio tool to
create a new DW/ELT project, define the connections to your data
sources and targets, create the physical data models for those
databases using two different methods, visualize the
entity-relationship (ER) diagrams of these models, and deploy the
model for your target warehouse in the physical database.
Objectives
When you have completed this tutorial, you will:
- Know the components and architecture of a solution involving
Informix Warehouse
- Be familiar with the functionality of the components in the
software
- Be familiar with Informix Warehouse's Design Studio — the
client component of Informix Warehouse — to create a new
DW/ELT project, connect to the data sources, and design the data
models of the source and target (the warehouse) databases
involved
Prerequisites
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Downloading the required
products
Some of the products mentioned here are available in trial versions
(see the Resources section). Informix
Dynamic Server Developer Edition is available at no cost. For any
software that you do not find available in trial or demo
resources, please consult with your IBM representative.
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This tutorial is written based on an Informix Dynamic Server and
Informix Warehouse installation on a Windows® platform. However,
most of the information in this tutorial applies in the context of a
solution on UNIX® or Linux® too. The tutorial is written
for Informix database users who are familiar with and have working
knowledge of Informix tools such as
dbaccess, SQL language and scripts, Windows
environments, and Eclipse-based IDE/GUI tools. You should also have
skills and experience in relational database design, ER models, data
warehousing, and ETL tools.
This tutorial assumes that you have:
- Informix Warehouse Feature Client installed. For more information
about how to install the product, please refer to the
Resources section.
- Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) 11.50.xC3 or later installed and a
basic working knowledge of IDS. For download information, please
refer to the Resources section.
System requirements
To run the examples in this tutorial, you need a system with at least
the Informix Warehouse Feature client installed and an Informix
Dynamic Server installed, with a database server instance up and
running (local or remote).
This tutorial works on a fictional and simplified example of a
business scenario in the Retail industry. You
will design and deploy an Informix data mart for Sales and Cost
analysis for the retail company Sports Stores. The new
warehouse repository will combine and aggregate data from one Informix
operational database and a few external files.
You will use the sample databases stores_demo as the source
operational (OLTP) system, and sales_demo as the target
warehouse (OLAP) system. To create the databases, follow these steps
(this tutorial assumes you run these commands as user admin,
which will be the schema under which the tables will be defined):
- Drop any databases called stores_demo and
sales_demo, if they already exist.
- Create and populate the sample stores_demo database with
the logging option. The
dbaccessdemo
script can be found in $INFORMIXDIR/bin:
- Create an empty sales_demo database with the logging
option:
dbaccess – -
> create database sales_demo with log ; |
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