|
The Three-Tier Business Intelligence Solution |
|
The Three-Tier Business Intelligence Solution |
Business Intelligence tools have the potential to empower business users like no other information technology in history. These tools promise to leverage corporate investments in client/server technology by delivering to users an entirely new capability - the ability to interactively access and analyze corporate data.
As data access tools are deployed, the number of users and size of the databases can grow tremendously. The impact of dozens and perhaps hundreds of users generating complex queries can lead to chaos -- by severely degrading server and network performance as well as query response time.
The solution lies in a three-tier architecture. This approach allows data access functions to be partitioned among clients and servers. In the same way application development tools are providing a three-tier architecture for large-scale deployments, IQ/SmartServer delivers superior performance, unprecedented scalability and optimum resource utilization for data access by users.
IQ/SmartServer is the first data access tool to implement a three-tier architecture. It can be combined with IQ Software's client tools to form a highly manageable solution that allows organizations to empower business users without creating corporate chaos.
IQ/SmartServer allows for "division of labor" among clients and servers. Each tier in the architecture can perform the functions it does best.
IQ Software's three-tier architecture is a logical implementation. It does not require three physical tiers. The application server and the data sources may be implemented on a single server or on multiple servers depending upon the need of the enterprise.
With IQ/SmartServer, query processing can be targeted for the server, the client, or the combination of server and client. This eliminates the "fat client syndrome" in which virtually all data access and processing functions are performed on the client. These functions include:
With the growing complexity of queries, users of client-only
data access tools may experience poor performance.
IQ/SmartServer delivers superior performance by executing complex processing functions on powerful servers. Queries that could take hours to complete on the client workstation can be completed in minutes -- or even seconds -- using IQ SmartServer. IQ/SmartServer dramatically reduces network traffic when compared to desktop-centric tools which may schedule the SQL processing on the server but return raw data over the network to the client workstation for output processing.
IQ/SmartServer has been designed to start small and grow with your business needs -- from dozens to hundreds of users. By supporting multiple application servers, IQ SmartServer allows resources to be added incrementally. To start, IQ/SmartServer can reside on the database server. As the work load increases, query processing can be offloaded to a separate server. Over time, query processing functions can be directed to multiple workgroup or departmental servers -- the marketing server and the finance department server for example. This provides unprecedented scalability and flexibility.
IQ/SmartServer offers a comprehensive scheduling facility.
Queries can be scheduled to run immediately, daily, weekly,
monthly, quarterly or yearly. Special scheduling can be
specified such as to run a query every last Sunday of the
month. Other options include running a query a finite
number of times, or indefinitely until rescheduled or
canceled by the database administrator. The SmartServer
also allows the option to save the report output for future,
or automatically purge it once the output is printed.
Queries and reports can be completely processed on the server. The results can then be either sent directly to the server printers or saved in a file on the server that can be shared by multiple users. By allowing queries to be scheduled and processed during non-peak hours, IQ SmartServer makes the most of valuable computing resources.
Complex production reports, which would normally require programming in 3GL or 4GL tools, can be created using the rich functionality of IQ Software's suite of client data access tools. These reports can then be scheduled and processed on the servers. The sophisticated output processing of IQ SmartServer allows automatic mapping of fonts between Windows and UNIX. In addition, IQ/SmartServer supports critical features necessary to ensure proper server execution including.
|
|
The database administrator may restrict the number of concurrent queries that execute on any server to maintain adequate response time for everyone on the system. Only IQ SmartServer offers the ability to so fully utilize and totally manage client and server computing resources.
IQ/SmartServer is available for UNIX or Windows NT servers, and takes full advantage of their multi-tasking capabilities. It supports a wide range of hardware platforms including:
Data warehousing is becoming a dominant IT strategy for empowering business users with information. Implementating a data warehouse involves extracting data from production databases and consolidating it in the data warehouse so that it is easily accessible to business users. The appropriateness of the data access tool selected for data warehousing plays a major role in its successful and wide- spread adoption.
Data access tools for data warehousing have special requirements. First, data warehouses can grow very quickly to comprise terabytes of data. Second, deployments of data warehouses can be quite large, serving hundreds of users. Third, as users come to rely on warehoused data, their queries can become complex. If not specifically addressed by the tool, these characteristics of data warehouses can lead to such profound performance degradation and network traffic as to render the data warehouse useless.
The three-tier architecture of IQ/SmartServer addresses each of these concerns by allowing data access functions to be partitioned across clients, application servers, and database servers. As a result, IQ/SmartServer delivers superior performance, scalability, resource utilization, and response times.