DB2 Gets Cube Smart

IBM Cube Views Bolster Relational Engine

IBM claims to have taken some of the pain out of online analytic processing (OLAP) with a new piece of software called Cube Views that adds OLAP administrative and performance-enhancing functions to DB2, IBM's relational database.

With Cube Views, DBAs will be able to store OLAP metadata in DB2. Metadata defines "data cubes," those multidimensional structures that allow all the slicing and dicing of information that has become the hallmark of analytic processing.

IBM has its own OLAP engine, DB2 OLAP Server, but Cube Views is designed to handle the metadata of most leading OLAP vendors. " It [Cube Views] makes DB2 data cube-aware," says Anant Jhingran, director of business intelligence development at IBM. "You can use the database as a central repository for all your OLAP metadata, and then build your cubes using any number of different OLAP engines."

Jhingran says DB2's new OLAP savvy will also make for faster queries. "Cube Views can use the metadata to define and populate better materialized query tables, and this is what allows you to optimize performance."

Aaron Zornes, analyst at Meta Group's Silicon Valley research center, says better support for metadata would be a relief. "Metadata is usually holy hell to play with. Anything you can do to grease the process of metadata manipulation is important."

Brio, Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects, Informatica, and MicroStrategy are among the 15 BI vendors endorsing Cube Views as good news. "It is great that all these guys are lining up behind this," said Zornes, "but it also makes me a little suspicious. If they have to endorse it, that indicates they have to write to it, which would mean the interface is not transparent." Jhingran, however, stressed that the Cube Views interface is based on open standards, namely XML and Web services, and isn't an IBM proprietary play.

Whether or not IBM has broken new ground here is another question. Oracle says not. "We did this about two years ago when we put an OLAP catalog in release 1 of Oracle 9i," says William Endress, director of product management for OLAP technology at Oracle. "The catalog exposes OLAP metadata through two different interfaces: SQL and our Java OLAP API."

Stephen O'Grady, analyst with RedMonk in Bath, Maine, thinks IBM is offering something new with Cube Views. But, more important, all these efforts are part of a trend. "We are seeing the sublimation of more value-added features into enterprise database platforms. IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are all moving in this direction."

— Mark Leon

Mark Leon [mrleon@usfca.edu] has been reporting on business and technology for seven years.

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