Data warehouses in the 1990s were for the privileged few business analysts. Business Intelligence is now being democratized by being shared with the rank and file employee demanding higher levels of RDBMS scalability and ease of use, being delivered through Web portals. To support this emerging e-Business Intelligence world, the challenges that face the enterprises for their centralized data warehouse RDBMS technology are scalability, performance, availability and smart manageability. This IBM Redbooks publication focuses on the innovative technical functionalities of DB2 UDB ESE V8.1 and discusses: This book positions the new functionalities, so you can understand and evaluate their applicability in your own enterprise data warehouse environment, and get started prioritizing and implementing them. Please note that the additional material referenced in the text is not available from IBM.

This IBM Redbooks publication deals with exploiting DB2 UDB’s materialized views (also known as ASTs/MQTs), statistics, analytic, and OLAP functions in e-business applications to achieve superior performance and scalability. This book is aimed at a target audience of DB2 UDB application developers, database administrators (DBAs), and independent software vendors (ISVs). We provide an overview of DB2 UDB’s materialized views implementation, as well as guidelines for creating and tuning them for optimal performance. We introduce key statistics, analytic, and OLAP functions, and describe their corresponding implementation in DB2 UDB with usage examples. Finally, we describe typical business level queries that can be answered using DB2 UDB’s statistics, analytic, and OLAP functions. These business queries are categorized by industry, and describe the steps involved in resolving the query, with sample SQL and visualization of results.