Coglin Mill has completed the first stage of integrating their RODIN Data Warehousing product with IBM’s Visual Warehouse, DataJoiner and DataPropagator products in the latest release of RODIN available on April 26^th, 1999.  This integration brings the strengths of each product together to deliver a highly flexible and sophisticated tool set that can create and maintain small to very large, simple to extremely complex, departmental to enterprise-wide, business intelligence systems.  Our integration with Visual Warehouse is part of the broader DB2 Metadata program, which offers our customers lower development and integration costs by being able to choose a variety of business intelligence tools which integrate the key metadata between them.

IBM’s Visual Warehouse version 5.2 was released in October 1998 and encompasses significant enhancements over previous versions.  Notably the integration of IBM’s industry leading metadata repository, previously known as DataGuide, was part of this new version of Visual Warehouse.

Visual Warehouse provides :-

1. the ability to control and manage cross-platform scheduling, processing, monitoring and reporting of all steps required in the initial loading and periodic refreshing and updating of the data warehouse and data mart environment,
2. utilities to copy data from remote systems and databases onto a central AS/400 for subsequent processing into the data warehouse and data marts, and
3. a centralized metadata repository that not only provides functional access to the various databases in the data warehouse and data mart environment but also provides an "Information Catalog” to document and publish all aspects of the business intelligence environment for everything from user documentation to impact analysis.  

And finally, where data needs to be sourced from non-DB2 databases such as Oracle, Informix, Sybase, SQL Server and others, IBM’s DataJoiner can be used to "connect” those foreign databases to a DB2/400 database on the AS/400.  As for DataPropagator, RODIN can then process this data through its standard data acquisition facilities into the data warehouse environment. 

The new release of RODIN (i.e. V3R1 available April 1999) provides the most sophisticated data acquisition and data management capabilities of any automated tool available on any platform.  It runs on the AS/400 and leverages DB2/400 as the underlying database technology as well as integrates into the above mentioned IBM data management products.

Facilities provided by RODIN include :-

1. sophisticated data extraction, validation, transformation and processing logic not possible with SQL loading tools including temporal database support, automatic management of "generalized” keys and "many to many” load capabilities in a single pass of the source data, 
2. automated error detection, correction and reject handling, including reporting, holding and reprocessing of rejects,
3. flexible data warehouse and data mart structures including time series arrays integrated into user-definable calendars to support all forms of comparative analyses,
4. an integrated server-based report writer that utilizes the power of the active metadata to deliver simple-to-use but highly sophisticated data analysis and reporting, with paper, screen and database output, 
5. automatic generation of HLL object code from "active” metadata to deliver unparalleled functionality and performance levels,
6. high speed parallel processing in both SMP and MPP environments with almost 100% linear scaling,
7. a fully graphical interface to all RODIN and Visual Warehouse functions that also provides a single secured access point for all tools used in the business intelligence environment, and
8. an open architecture that allows integration with all other industry standard compliant tools.

Customers can implement RODIN, Visual Warehouse, DataPropagator and DataJoiner in any combination and any sequence, to suit their exact requirements.  Many configurations and options exists to ensure only the required components need be licensed.

The integration of RODIN with IBM’s leading data management middleware products means customers can now utilize the very best technology available on any platform to meet their entire data warehousing needs on the AS/400, regardless of the sources of data and the complexity of the environment. 

With the open architecture of the resultant data warehouse and dependant data marts, any industry standard data mart, data analysis or data visualization tool can be easily added to and integrated into the overall business intelligence environment.  This provides the easy integration of a "solution oriented architecture” required to drive modern successful businesses of all sizes and complexities.