The power of Visual Warehouse and the simplicity of the DB2 Control Center have been merged to provide a single, new user interface for business intelligence customers. You can use the Data Warehouse Center to register and access data sources, define data extraction and transformation steps, populate data warehouses, automate and monitor warehouse management processes, and manage and interchange metadata. The Warehouse launchpad simplifies the job of populating a warehouse by leading you through the related tasks. The Data Warehouse Center supports full refresh and incremental update data movement options including leveraging the power of IBM's integrated data replication functions. Integrated SQL Assist capabilities (see SQL Assist) help customers define over 100 transformations using the rich SQL available with DB2. Users can also build custom transformation routines using Stored Procedure Builder (see Stored Procedure Builder).
See the Data Warehouse Center Administration Guide and the Data Warehouse Center Application Integration Guide for more warehousing information.
Within the Data Warehouse Center, the warehouse schema modeler is a specialized tool for generating and storing schema associated with a data warehouse. Any schema resulting from this process can be passed easily as metadata to the OLAP Integration Server, which is part of the OLAP Starter Kit and the DB2 OLAP Server. See the Data Warehouse Center Administration Guide for more information.
The process modeler allows users to graphically link the steps needed to build and maintain data warehouses and dependent data marts. Dependency relationships, conditional processing, and notifications can all be included in the model. Processes can be scheduled for one-time or repeating execution, or triggered by internal or external processes.
With DB2 Version 7.2, the Data Warehouse Center provides additional flexibility for creating and changing warehouse target tables. When a change to a warehouse step creates additional columns, you can have the Data Warehouse Center automatically create the new columns in the target table and map the results of the step to these new columns. You can also now choose the name and table space for the target table.
The Data Warehouse Center expands its role as a tool integration hub for data quality and cleansing tools by adding support for Trillium. Trillium can be used to perform name and address cleansing, matching, merging, and demographic augmentation processes. Using the Data Warehouse Center, you can seamlessly include name and address cleansing operations in warehouse processes, which can be scheduled or run on demand. The Data Warehouse Center already provides integration with tools from Vality and Evolutionary Technologies, Inc.
The Data Warehouse Center now displays red borders on required fields. The red borders alert you to information such as database names, user IDs, or passwords that are necessary to define the Data Warehouse Center objects. When you enter the required information, the borders disappear.