Enabling Real-time Analytics on IBM z Systems Platform

Book excerpt: Regarding online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, IBM® z SystemsTM platform, with IBM DB2®, data sharing, Workload Manager (WLM), geoplex, and other high-end features, is the widely acknowledged leader. Most customers now integrate business analytics with OLTP by running, for example, scoring functions from transactional context for real-time analytics or by applying machine-learning algorithms on enterprise data that is kept on the mainframe. As a result, IBM adds investment so clients can keep the complete lifecycle for data analysis, modeling, and scoring on z Systems control in a cost-efficient way, keeping the qualities of services in availability, security, reliability that z Systems solutions offer. Because of the changed architecture and tighter integration, IBM has shown, in a customer proof-of-concept, that a particular client was able to achieve an orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance, allowing that client's data scientist to investigate the data in a more interactive process. Open technologies, such as Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) can help customers update single components instead of being forced to replace everything at once. As a result, you have the possibility to combine your preferred tool for model generation (such as SAS Enterprise Miner or IBM SPSS® Modeler) with a different technology for model scoring (such as Zementis, a company focused on PMML scoring). IBM SPSS Modeler is a leading data mining workbench that can apply various algorithms in data preparation, cleansing, statistics, visualization, machine learning, and predictive analytics. It has over 20 years of experience and continued development, and is integrated with z Systems. With IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator 5.1 and SPSS Modeler 17.1, the possibility exists to do the complete predictive model creation including data transformation within DB2 Analytics Accelerator. So, instead of moving the data to a distributed environment, algorithms can be pushed to the data, using cost-efficient DB2 Accelerator for the required resource-intensive operations. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the overall z Systems architecture, how the components can be installed and customized, how the new IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator loader can help efficient data loading for z Systems data and external data, how in-database transformation, in-database modeling, and in-transactional real-time scoring can be used, and what other related technologies are available. This book is intended for technical specialists and architects, and data scientists who want to use the technology on the z Systems platform. Most of the technologies described in this book require IBM DB2 for z/OS®. For acceleration of the data investigation, data transformation, and data modeling process, DB2 Analytics Accelerator is required. Most value can be achieved if most of the data already resides on z Systems platforms, although adding external data (like from social sources) poses no problem at all.