The industry has been waiting for and wondering when IBM Corp was going to come out and clarify its approach to distributed computing – it has so far been silent about the mechanisms on offer at the Object Management Group for the Object Request Broker and missed the opportunity to join the technical committee reviewing the technology on offer. It is of course adopting the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, but generally speaking it has not made its intentions clear as to how its users will get hold of enterprise-wide data. Its intentions are still officially a secret, but Earl Wheeler, known affectionately as the father of SAA, took the opportunity recently to throw a little light on its strategy by explaining to Computerworld that the company will be rolling out a plan for users this autumn that will mirror the AD/Cycle announcement two years ago. The strategy will draw on the analogy of the data warehouse and Wheeler explained that the idea will be to retrieve data from any hardware or operating system no matter what structure that data is in. Using the minimum number of interfaces the data will be retrieved and delivered to the application that requested it or to the decision support system. Computerworld raised a sceptical eyebrow at the plan, not least be-cause like most IBM concepts it appears to be long on architecture and short on deliverable pro-ducts. However, Paul Hessinger, vicepresident of research at Computer Task Group Inc recently said in London that he expected strong third-party offerings and a whole new genre of business partnerships akin to AD/Cycle, when the plan is announced later this year. The cruel economics driving the warehouse concept is allegedly that data processing managers are having difficulty justifying the investment required to buy into DB2. While the Repository is evidently central to SAA and AD/Cycle, DB2, it could be argued, is just another mainframe-class relational database with SQL connections. There is a lack of architectural vision surrounding it, and no real context to persuade users to move across from IMS. So the marketing hook for the Warehouse will be that it is proprietary technology offered through extensions to DB2. IBM will provide some of the tools such as a delta management tool that will define the rules under which data will be refreshed in the Warehouse as new information comes into the database. Hessinger suggested that IBM’s Distributed Relational Database Architecture could provide the distribution mechanism for users. IBM has reportedly been touting this Architecture round various standard bodies and independent database vendors to get it accepted as a universal standard. Unveiled in July (CI No 1,460), it prescribes commands, data descriptors, data, objects, communications areas, and statements and builds on other Common Communications Support protocols such as SNA LU6.2, a new level of Distributed Data Management, Formatted Data Object Content Architecture and Character Data Representation Architecture. Potential partners to fill in product gaps for the information warehouse could include names such as Metaphor Computer Systems Inc and Information Builders Inc, suggested Hessinger. Metaphor, in which IBM took a 10% stake in 1988, is likely to provide its Data Interpretation System as an interface component in the information warehouse. The marketing agreement that IBM signed with Metaphor over a year ago stated that gateways to non-IBM hosts and databases were to be developed.
Capsule window
Currently the System offers services, gateways and workstation communications with MVS, VM or OS/2 database manager, while multiple local area networks may be combined using SNA LU6.2 (CI No 1,480). It features a Capsule application development tool that captures the operational steps leading to an analysis so that the user can use the mouse to move the necessary icons into a capsule window. These icons can then be connected to electronic arrows depicting the desired sequence of operations. This sequence can then be stored as a si
ngle icon and reactivated with a single click. Information Builders Focnet strategy to implement client-server co-operative processing may well be used as another component for the warehouse. Focnet can already provide distributed procedures, stored as executable objects that can be accessed via remote procedure calls for cross-machine object execution. Next year Information Builders claims it will have system-wide data transparency at the application level (CI No 1,428). Katy Ring
