Re: What is Pick anyway?

David Cressey wrote:
<snip>
> Say some more about Universe. How does it relate to Pick?

UniVerse is one of the U's in the IBM U2 suite of products -- UniVerse & UniData. See
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/products/u2/

> Can the "L" part
> of ETL be loading the data into a relational database? Is this common
> practice?

The Ascential DataStage product, now part of the WebSphere product line (ihttp://ibm.ascential.com/ ) is almost always used with both the source and target being SQL-DBMS products (that's where the money is). While some Pick folks use SQL-DBMS tools for data warehousing or data marts, most Pick folks don't have the same need to do so as they can use the same data model for transaction processing as for OLAP and other BI needs. The only reason they move it to SQL-DBMS tools is to get better ODBC capabilities and use of standard BI interfaces. There are fewer products that use a native Pick language for data access (although there are some).

With IBM's acquisition of Ascential, IBM now has 3 separate Pick databases, one of which is embedded in the Ascential DataStage product that evolved from UniVerse. I will be including Ascential coming from Informix and then into IBM in the next version of the Pick/MultiValue family tree (pdf file on my web site at
http://www.tincat-group.com/mv/familytree.html ) because they did not continue as a user of UniVerse. IBM and Ascential enhanced it separately, so these are now two separate flavors.

--dawn Received on Wed Dec 28 2005 - 17:14:33 CET