IBM reveals Informix technology plans

IBM is looking to utilise Informix technology in its DB2 database to enable real-time analysis of streaming data such as ticker-tape data, company officials said this week.

"What's going on with DB2 is in the area of streams. How do you deal with streams of information?" said IBM's Don Haderle, CTO and vice president of IBM data management solutions and an inventor of DB2, in San Jose, California.

IBM is pondering how to use the Informix Time Series Real Time Loader and Numerical Analysis Generator datablade in DB2 to help boost DB2's real-time data analysis capabilities, Haderle said. The Real Time Loader reads data from a ticker tape and inserts it into memory.

DB2 can perform these functions currently, by combining IBM's DataJoiner software with the Informix software. The plan is to enable this type of analysis without requiring the linkage, according to IBM.

A user of IBM's Intelligent Miner data analysis software expressed an interest in the real-time functionality being touted by IBM.

"We're doing scoring on a monthly basis," said Ted Mendes, director of data management services at the Bank of Montreal. "We have architected [our system] so that we can support more frequent scoring so whether that is weekly, or daily, or even real-time, we technically can do that."