IBM Rational Insight Data Services

As an enterprise reporting system, IBM® Rational® Insight requires access to data from different product tools and sources. Making data readily accessible for reporting and analytics is a key objective of IBM Rational Insight data services.

Extracting data from operational sources

Operational data sources are those that are accessed by 'live' organizational systems for regular transactions and reports. You can access data sources using ODBC drivers or through data services. A data service can be provided by Rational Insight or by the product itself. It can also be created by the user. Rational Insight provides data services for Rational ClearQuest®, Rational ClearCase®, Rational RequisitePro®, and Rational TestManager. Rational Quality Manager and Microsoft® Project provide their own data services. In the case of Rational Team Concert (RTC), Rational Insight gets data from the RTC data warehouse using direct database access.

Rational Insight data services use a REST architecture to extract data from different sources and deliver it to a data warehouse or to a reporting server. REST is a technique for returning XML data using web infrastructure (the HTTP protocol). Operational data from different sources is exposed through different data access methods, and defined as a resource by a URL. The response to the URL request is typically a representation of that resource in XML format. After data is extracted in XML format, it must be converted to relational tables for use directly by IBM Rational Insight report server or for storage in the IBM Rational Insight data warehouse.

Reporting on data

A data service delivers data from operational sources to either a reporting server or to the data warehouse. The reporting server then either uses the data directly to generate live reports or picks it up from the warehouse to generate analytical reports.


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