Skytide, a leading provider of next-generation business analytics solutions, today announced the availability of a new whitepaper that documents the benefits and scalability of the Skytide Analytical Platform when used in conjunction with IBM DB2 9 based on recently-completed testing. Co-authored by IBM and Skytide, the whitepaper, entitled Skytide Analytical Platform for DB2 9 Data: Large Volume Business Analytics for XML Data, demonstrates how XML data can be analyzed without mapping it to a relational format and the improvements that are made possible by this approach.
The paper demonstrates that the combination of Skytide with pureXML storage in DB2 is up to 35 times faster than processing XML as CLOBs when building analytic models, and up to 85 times
faster than processing XML files from a file server. This enables the analysis of large volumes of XML data at high performance for gaining valuable business insight, according to white
paper co-authors from Skytide and IBM.
The white paper states that: "Skytide and DB2 are designed for efficient management of XML data, Skytide offers a full set of business analytics functionality directly on XML, eliminating
the need to normalize and map XML data to a traditional relational format for the purpose of business analytics. Moreover, Skytide's capability to utilize DB2's XML querying capabilities
to selectively pull only relevant data leads to significantly faster cube build times and a highly optimized analytics solution."
The paper begins by discussing XML storage alternatives including DB2 pureXML, CLOB and File Systems. It then details a comparison of XQuery and Skytide and provides insight into cube
design considerations. Finally, the paper presents complete performance results, including the seven representative queries that were benchmarked across all four scenarios.
The whitepaper concludes that, "The measurement results described in this article show clearly that there is a substantial performance benefit for building multi-dimensional data cubes
over XML data if DB2 9 pureXML and Skytide are used together."
The paper is available free of charge on the Skytide website: www.skytide.com.
About the White Paper Co-Authors:
Tom Tortolani, VP of Product Management at Skytide
For 20 years, he has led Product Management at various successful enterprise software start-ups. As an early employee at Hyperion Solutions/ Arbor Software, Tom was a key contributor to
the creation of the BI and OLAP industry, managing over 20 product releases of the Essbase product family. In earlier years, Tom was a Financial Analyst at the Target Corporation with a
focus on forecasting, planning, and business analysis. Tom is the primary inventor on US patent 6,317,750 for advanced multidimensional navigational techniques. He holds a BA degree in
Economics from Bowdoin College.
Vijay Bommireddipalli, Advisory Software Engineer in the Data Servers Solutions, IBM
As part of IBM's Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, CA, Vijay assists customers and partners in developing solutions on DB2. Prior to joining this team, Vijay was a developer on the
Warehouse Manager development team. He joined IBM in July 2000, after finishing his Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth.
Matthias Nicola, Senior Software Engineer for DB2 pureXML, IBM
Matthias works with the DB2 XML development teams as well as with customers and business partners who are using XML, assisting them in the design, implementation, and optimization of XML
solutions. Prior to joining IBM, Matthias worked on data warehousing performance for Informix Software, and in research and industry projects on distributed and replicated databases. He
received his doctorate in computer science in 1999 from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany.