Enabling Real-time Analytics on IBM z Systems Platform

Regarding online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, IBM z Systems 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. 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.