BI/Data Warehouse Visibility and Control
Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Environments Are Under Siege
Business intelligence and data warehousing environments, plus business intelligence and other user-driven analytical applications are dynamic, resource intensive and unpredictable. Powerful business intelligence tools, along with Excel and many other readily available SQL access tools allow business users the freedom to create their own “application” or analysis on the fly. Users often use these to respond to changing business demands, new reporting requirements and updated information.
System use in these dynamic environments is subject to inappropriate user behavior, rogue applications and malformed queries that can slow overall application performance, generate incorrect results, violate compliance or security policies and waste system resources. These user-generated problems reduce business performance, while increasing support and system costs and user frustration.
Management challenges for these environments include:
- Preventing users from slowing overall performance with poorly formed queries
- Quickly identifying and fixing what is really causing performance bottlenecks
- Finding out what data is really being used by business users
- Determining which applications or users are generating resource-wasting queries
- Getting ahead of business demands
Teleran’s Solution — Visibility and Control of the Entire Environment
Teleran’s patented business-intelligence/data-warehouse solution provides comprehensive awareness and control of user behavior, application activity and database usage. Teleran’s automated tracking, analysis and real-time user management capabilities help IT to improve performance and manageability across all business-intelligence applications, while reducing support and system costs.
Benefits
- Provides visibility on how the business is using and valuing business-intelligence applications and data
- Improves performance and efficiency by preventing inefficient user behavior
- Reduces operating risks by identifying and preventing inappropriate use
- Minimizes support costs and effort by automating user guidance and control
- Ensures compliance with real-time usage auditing and data access controls
- Helps target and justify IT investments by tracking business use of applications and infrastructure
- Reduces costs and risks of consolidations by analyzing existing usage and data models
Improving Data Warehouse Performance Case Study
The commercial finance division of a diversified Fortune 10 company developed an affinity credit card data warehouse application to serve their marketing and risk departments. The system rapidly grew into a mission-critical application that supported both internal groups and external customers — affinity credit card issuers who receive analyses from the data warehouse as part of their service contract.
Ultimately, over 600 business analysts ran increasingly large and complex queries against the data warehouse. These queries degraded performance, impacting user productivity and slowing customer access to their affinity card business reports. The data warehouse data refresh processes were suffering from performance problems as well, reducing availability for all users. Given these problems, the company decided they needed to assess overall system usage and capacity to determine if they needed to upgrade their IT infrastructure. However, the company had no way of analyzing actual user query behavior or assessing its impact on system performance and resource consumption. The company also had no way of controlling suspected inefficient or inappropriate query behavior.
Streamlining IBM DB2 Enterprise Data Warehouse Case Study
This diversified financial services company had grown its brokerage business through two recent acquisitions. As a result of the mergers, the company's IT organization had to consolidate a variety of systems and applications within a short period of time. Their newly consolidated enterprise data warehouse, operating on the IBM DB2 platform, was now supporting a range of functions in the company. Because they are responsible for revenue generation, the brokers are one of the most critical groups using the data warehouse. They access the data warehouse to review customer portfolios, analyze trading activity, and research customer inquiries, among other things.