System overview

To support end-to-end Data warehousing solutions, data warehousing in Db2® provides an infrastructure for warehouse building and maintenance and for developing and automating data mining tasks.

The following components play a role in the mining process:

Data warehousing in Db2 Design Studio
Application developers and Data warehousing or data mining specialists use this Eclipse-based client component to design the following items:
  • Data flows that represent the preprocessing phase of a mining project.

    You can use the transformation operators that are provided by the SQL Warehousing tool to create the input tables that are required for your mining task.

    You can also use the Data Preparation tools for mining, input models, or profiles to create preprocessing flows or SQL scripts that transform your data into a form that is suitable for data mining.

  • Mining (data) flows that integrate key-data mining-operations into an SQL-based model.
  • Control flows that order a set of related data flows and mining flows and define processing rules for the execution of these data flows.
  • Deployment packages that contain the files and the parameters that form a complete application that is ready for installation and execution.
WebSphere® Application Server (WAS)
The WAS component provides the runtime deployment environment for SQL warehousing applications. You can deploy an SQL warehousing application that contains mining flows to automate mining tasks that run at scheduled times. Administrators who schedule and manage deployed applications access this component by using a browser-based Administration Console or a command-line interface.
Data warehousing in Db2 Administration Console
Administrators can use the Administration Console to deploy, run, or monitor data warehousing applications including mining flows, or to manage mining models. Because the data warehousing in Db2 Administration console client is browser-based, an installation on the client machine is not required. The Administration console Web-application is installed on the WAS server. You can access it from any Web browser.
SQL execution database
The warehouse building processes that you design with SQL and mining operators are performed in the Db2 runtime environment. This is a Db2 installation that includes the Intelligent Miner® mining extenders.

In an easy small-scale installation or test environment, you can install these components on your Windows or Linux® client.

The following figure shows a typical configuration.

Figure 1. Typical configuration of data mining components
This figure shows a typical configuration of data mining components.

In a typical configuration of the data mining components, the data warehousing in Db2 Design Studio runs on a Windows client. The WAS runtime components run on an UNIX operating system. The execution database server with Intelligent Miner is separately installed on another UNIX operating system, while you can access the data warehousing in Db2 Administration console from any Web browser.