IBM UK Ltd has signed a marketing agreement with Information Builders Ltd that mirrors the agreement the two companies struck in the US last September when the Information Warehouse was announced. In the UK IBM will now market and sell Information Builders’ EDA/SQL products. Enterprise Systems business unit director in the UK Arthur Parker explained that it is left up to each IBM subsidiary to implement frameworks as they see fit evidently IBM UK thought better of signing up Digital Equipment Corp’s Information Network products and after a great deal of thought came round to IBM Corp’s way of thinking. Bachman Information Systems Inc, however, is still not signed up in the UK as an Information Warehouse partner. EDA/SQL is an enterprise-wide data access method enabling data to be accessed in relational and non-relational storage via SQL. Client environments supported to date include the Apple Mac, AIX 3.0, DEC VAX/VMS, MS-DOS, MVS/ESA, MVS/XA, Windows 3.0, OS/2 1.3 and SunOS. The idea is that EDA/SQL offers access from a variety of products such as spreadsheets, executive information systems, software engineering products, proprietary languages, high-level languages and so on to data held in 26 different databases and file structures on IBM mainframes and high-end DEC machines. User proof that all the interfaces work is promised later this year, but however good EDA/SQL is, it cannot fill all the gaping holes in the Information Warehouse. IBM stresses that this is only the beginning of the roll-out and knowing IBM, an entreprise-wide Information Model and distributed repository will appear at the speed of light. And just after that somebody may explain how AD/Cycle fits in (clue: only Bachman has the answer). In the meantime, to make the picture clearer more Information Warehouse partners may well be announced in March. As for tools to help users move data from mainframes to Unix boxes and personal computer networks, Parker pointed out that users do not need to do that with the Information Warehouse. Quite, so if you’re thinking about rightsizing, or come to that any serious distributed data strategy, my advice is to ignore Information Warehouse altogether at the moment. – Katy Ring
