Re: Business Objects with DB2 data

I have loved the responses in this thread. Forget ETL. Forget offloading reporting to BO & MS SQL Server. Distributing workloads across multiple platforms is too costly & doesn't fix the problem. Do assist users by creating SQL views. Do address "bugs" & performance issues.




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From: DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 2, 2013 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: Business Objects with DB2 data


Congratulations you ARE Off BOTH the AS/400 and OS/400!

What you have is NOT an AS/400 rather it's a Power System! You have a
POWER6 machine with two processor cores. You can be running IBM i 5.4.5,
6.1, or 7.1 on this hardware.

Now that you've gotten the hardware guy involved you'll need to answer
more questions. :-)

How much memory do you have? WRKHDWRSC *PRC will show the 'sticks' and
WRKSHRPOOL will show amount for this partition at the top.

What sort of disk configuration do you have?  Probably the best way to
know is WRKDSKSTS as well as WRKHDWRSC *STG. This shows the quantity and
type of disks as well as the type and quantity of RAID cards.

This information will help determine if something is undersized or
potentially bottle-necking your processing.

It cannot be stressed enough that hardware can almost always fix your
performance problems. It CANNOT always do this within your budget
however!! Business partners who 'do you a favor' and migrate over old
bits and pieces often are NOT 'doing any favors' in the performance,
power consumption, or maintenance dollars department!

This entire 'get off the AS/400' thinking though is humorous to me as it
clearly is to many others here. Paul brought up the views argument, a
good one, because with proper views performance can be extremely good.

One of my customers years ago ordered 'A LAN card'. As they already had
redundant connections I asked them what for?  They said it was for
Crystal Reports - I needed an explanation. Turns out they were FTPing
about 80% of their DB to a crystal reports server EVERY DAY and it was
taking too long. They figured the problem would be solved by adding a
dedicated Ethernet card!!  They spent 14 hours FTPing and importing data
and two hours running reports. IN their case they weren't after
performance so much as 'offloading the AS/400'.  I had them take the
most complicated SQL from the key Crystal reports and run it on i.
Results took under 10 seconds! Cost myself the sale of an Ethernet card
right there......