Fantastic football game.

More details here.

You can download it here.

The trial allows you to evaluate the Enterprise Edition of InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 for 90-days at no cost.  All features are enabled in the trial.

Whether you call it egosurfing, egosearching, or vanity searching, you have probably tried “googling yourself” at least once.  That is, you typed your name into your favourite search engine to see what results appeared.

If you want to keep regular tabs on those search results, it can be a annoying to re-type your name each time.  To prevent writer’s cramp, you can turn to a free service called Google Alerts.  Google Alert provides automatic email updates on search results for keywords that you provide.

It is very easy to create a Google Alert for your name.  The instructions are below:

1. Visit http://www.google.com/alerts
2. Type your name in the Search terms field.  It’s best to add double quotes like this: “john p. kennedy”
3. Select “Comprehensive” in the Type field.  Of course, if you want to restrict the results, you can select any of the other options.
4. Select the update frequency in the How often field.
5. Type your email address in the Your email field.
6. Click the Create Alert button.

Before Google creates the alert, it sends a verification email to the email address you provided.  Once you receive this email, click on the link to validate the request and create the alert.

For more details on Google Alerts, visit the frequently asked questions (FAQ).

[If you’re unfamiliar with benefits of Cubing Services, check out this short video.]

Since then, the team at IBM International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) have been working hard with our InfoSphere Warehouse experts to deliver new 2 free publications.

The first new publication is entitled “Enabling Robust Business Analytics with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services”.  Here’s the abstract:

In this IBM® Redguide™ publication, we describe how you can develop an environment that will enable you to perform more detailed analytics on your data and turn it into powerful information and business insight for making better informed decisions. Business decisions have historically been made primarily by analyzing data with techniques that limit you to a two dimensional view of that data. However, decisions are rarely defined or determined by such a narrow perspective. Now you can view and analyze your data from multiple perspectives – or dimensions as they are called in the technical world. We call this Multidimensional Analysis. With multidimensional analysis, you can extract significantly more business value from your data resources. We refer to that information as business intelligence. You can discover, for example, trends and patterns in the data that you might never have realized were there. And you can begin to really understand what variables truly impact your business. IBM has made it easier and gives you the tools to help you develop this capability and a significant business advantage.

[This publication is a Redguide.  Unlike a Redbook, which provides in-depth technical information and implementation guidance, a Redguide is shorter and focuses on the business view of technology.]

The second new publication is a Redbook entitled “Multidimensional Analytics: Delivered with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services”.  Here is the abstract:

In this IBM Redbooks publication, we discuss and describe a multidimensional data warehousing infrastructure that can enable solutions for complex problems in an efficient and effective manner. The focus of this infrastructure is the InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services Feature. With this feature, DB2 becomes the data store for large volumes of data that you can use to perform multidimensional analysis, which enables viewing complex problems from multiple perspectives, which provides more information for management business decision making. This feature supports analytic tool interfaces from powerful data analysis tools, such as Cognos 8 BI, Microsoft Excel, and Alphablox.

This is a significant capability that supports and enhances the analytics that clients use as they work to resolve problems with an ever growing scope, dimension, and complexity.

Analyzing problems by performing more detailed queries on the data and viewing the results from multiple perspectives yields significantly more information and insight. Building multidimensional cubes based on underlying DB2 relational tables, without having to move or replicate the data, enables significantly more powerful data analysis with less work and leads to faster problem resolution with the capability for more informed management decision making.

This capability is known as No Copy Analytics and is made possible with InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services.

Here’s the chapter outline:

1. Introduction
2. A multidimensional infrastructure
3. The relational multidimensional model
4. Cubing services model implementation
5. Reporting solutions
6. Cubing services performance considerations
7. InfoSphere Warehouse on System z: Cubing Services

Do yourself a favour and visit FRANK Restaurant at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  I recently had brunch there.  Delicious.

A couple of courtesy reminders that (based on my current experience) deserve repeating:

1. When you leave your number on someone’s voicemail or answering machine, speak it slowly, and then slowly REPEAT it. Put yourself in the shoes of the person listening to your message. They may not have pen and paper quite yet. They have to hear it, understand it, and write it.
2. And take the time to edit subject lines in replying e-mails.  Most folks have huge e-mail volume, and being able to scan for the thrust of relevant communications on the fly makes a difference.

Last week we announced that sub-capacity pricing is now available in all editions of InfoSphere Warehouse 9.5.  In addition, we increased the processor value unit limits for Starter Edition and Intermediate Edition and extended On/Off Capacity on Demand licensing.

You can find more details in the official announcement letters are listed below:

IBM InfoSphere Warehouse helps you to control information infrastructure costs with expanded, flexible pricing configurations for all product editions

Both DB2 Linux, UNIX, and Windows 9.5 and Informix Dynamic Server 11.50 also extended sub-capacity pricing.

In other news, DB2’s industry leading pureXML feature is now included in the core product at no-charge.  Conor O’Mahoney discusses this at his Native XML Database blog.

Below is a YouTube video of a younger (and healthier) Steve Job’s demonstrating the Mac.

In other news, DB2 9.5 is now available for free on Mac OS X Leopard.

If so, you’ll definitely want to get a copy of the new IBM Redbook, InfoSphere Warehouse: Cubing Services and Client Access Interfaces.  Best of all, you can download the entire book for free.

Here’s the abstract below:

Formerly known as DB2® Warehouse, InfoSphere™ Warehouse enables a unified, powerful data warehousing environment. It provides access to structured and unstructured data, as well as operational and transactional data. In this IBM® Redbooks® publication, we provide a brief overview of InfoSphere Warehouse, but the primary objective is to discuss and describe the capabilities of one particular component of the InfoSphere Warehouse, which is InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services.

InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services is designed to provide a multidimensional view of data stored in relational databases, for significantly improved query and analysis capabilities. For this, there are particular schema designs that are typically used for these data warehouse and data mart databases, called dimensional, or cube, models. Optimization techniques are used to dramatically improve the performance of the OLAP queries, which are a core component of data warehousing and analytics.

InfoSphere Warehouse Cubing Services works with business intelligence (BI) tools, and clients, such as Cognos® , Alphablox, and Microsoft® Excel® , through client interfaces, to accelerate OLAP queries from many data sources. We describe these interfaces and provide examples of how to use them to improve the performance of your OLAP queries.

Here’s the chapter outline:

1. Introduction
2. The cubing lifecycle
3. Modeling using IBM InfoSphere Warehouse Design Studio
4. Creating the Cube Model
5. Designing Cubes
6. Deploying and managing the cube
7. Cube server performance
8. Using the Excel Client Interface
9. Cognos and the cube model
10. Using the Alphablox Client Interface
11. MDX Overview
12. Best Practices

IBM Redbooks are technical “how-to” guides.  The IBM International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) has been developing and publishing these popular guides for over 40 years.  To see more Redbooks, visit http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/.