CHAPTER 5 LEGO: Combining Business Intelligence with a Flexible Information System

STUDY CASE

LEGO: Combining Business Intelligence with a Flexible Information System

1.      Explain the role of the database in SAP’s three-tier-system

·         First tier – client interface (client appreciation): It’s a browser type graphical user interface (GUI) running on laptop, desktop, or mobile device that submit user’s request to the appreciation server.

·         Second tier – appreciations server – appreciations server: Receive and process client requests. Send the processed requests to the database system.

·         Third tier – one or more relations database (data sources): SAP’s business suite supports database from different vendor, including those offered by oracle, Microsoft, My SQL, and others. The relational databases contain the tables that store data on LEGO’s products, daily operations, the supply chain, and thousands of employees.

2.      Explain why distributed architecture are flexible.

·         Distributed architecture are flexible because it does not require any technical skill to obtain reports from the databases. It also enables authorized personnel to have direct access to the database system from the company’s various locations, including those in Europe, North America, and Asia.

3.      Identify some of the business intelligence features included in SAP’s business software suite.

·         Business intelligence: tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to large amounts of data to improve decision making.

·         The business intelligence features included in SAP’s business software suite a SAP’s supply chain management (SCM), product life cycle (PLC), and Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) modules.

-          SCM modules includes essential features such as supply chain monitoring and analysis as well as forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization.

-          PLM modules enables managers to optimize development processes and system.

-          ERP modules includes The Human Capital Management (HCM) applications for personal administration and development.

4.      What are the main advantages and disadvantages of having multiple database in a distributed architecture? Explain.

Advantages:

·         Reflect organizational structure.

-          Many organizations are naturally distributed over several location. For example, Flextronics has plants in Mexico, Hungary, and Czech Republic. It is natural for database used in such an application to be distributed over these locations. The service company may keep database of each brand office containing details such things as the staff that work at that location, the account information of customer etc. The staff  at branch office will make local  inquires of the database. The company headquarters may wish to make global inquires involving the access of data at all or a number of branches.

·         Improved share ability and local autonomy

-          The geographical distribution of an organization can be reflected in the distribution of the data; users at one site can access data stored at other sites. Data can be placed at the site close to the users who normally use that data. In this way, users have local control of the data, and they can consequently establish and enforce local policies regarding the use of this data. A global database administrator (DBA) is responsible for the entire system. Generally, part of this responsibility is assigned the local level, so that the local DBA can manage the local DBMS.

·         Improved availability

-          In a centralized DBMS, a computer failure terminates the applications of the DBMS. However, a failure at one site of a DDBMS, or a failure of a communication link making\ some sites inaccessible, does not make the entire system in opera bite. Distributed DBMSs are designed to continue to function despite such failures. If a single node fails, the system may be able to reroute the failed node's requests to another site.

·         Improved reliability

-          As data may be replicated so that it exists at more than one site, the failure of a node or a communication link does not necessarily make the data inaccessible.

Improved Performance

As the data is located near the site of 'greatest demand', and given the inherent parallelism of distributed DBMSs, speed of database access may be better than that achievable from a remote centralized database. Furthermore, since each site handles only a part of the entire database, there may not be the same contention for CPU and I/O services as characterized by a centralized DBMS.

·         Economics

-          It is now generally accepted that it costs much less to create a system of smaller computers with the equivalent power of a single large computer. This makes it more cost effective for corporate divisions and departments to obtain separate computers. It is also much more cost-effective to add workstations· to a network than to update a mainframe system.

The second potential cost saving occurs where database are geographically remote and the applications require access to distributed data. In such cases, owing to the relative expense of data being transmitted across the network as opposed to the cost of local access, it may be much more economical to partition the application and perform the processing locally at each site.

·         Modular growth

-          In a distributed environment, it is much easier to handle expansion. New sites can be added to the network without affecting the operations of other sites. This flexibility allows an organization to expand relatively easily. Adding processing and storage power to the network can usually handle the increase in database size. In a centralized DBMS, growth may entail changes to both hardware (the procurement of a more powerful system) and software (the procurement of a more powerful or more configurable DBMS).

Disadvantages of DDBMS

There are following disadvantages of DDBMSs:

·         Complexity

-          A distributed DBMS that hides the distributed nature from the user and provides an acceptable level of performance, reliability, availability is inherently more complex then a centralized DBMS. The fact that data can be replicated also adds an extra level of complexity to the distributed DBMS. If the software does not handle data replication adequately, there wi1l be degradation in availability, reliability and performance compared with the centralized system, and the advantages we cites above will become disadvantages.

·         Cost

-          Increased complexity means that we can expect the procurement and maintenance costs for a DDBMS to be higher than those for a centralized DBMS. Furthermore, a distributed

DBMS requires additional hardware to establish a network between sites. There are ongoing communication costs incurred with the use of this network. There are also additional labor costs to manage and maintain the local DBMSs and the underlying network.

·         Security

-          In a centralized system, access to the data can be easily controlled. However, in a distributed DBMS not only does access to replicated data have to be controlled in multiple locations but also the network itself has to be made secure. In the past, networks were regarded as an insecure communication medium. Although this is still partially true, significant developments have been made to make networks more secure.

Integrity control more difficult

Database integrity refers to the validity and consistency of stored data. Integrity is usually expressed in terms of constraints, which are consistency rules that the database is not permitted to violate. Enforcing integrity constraints generally requires access to a large amount of data that defines the constraints. In a distributed DBMS, the communication and processing costs that are required to enforce integrity constraints are high as compared to centralized system.

·         Lack of Standards

-          Although distributed DBMSs depend on effective communication, we are only now starting to see the appearance of standard communication and data access protocols. This lack of standards has significantly limited the potential of distributed DBMSs. There are also no tools or methodologies to help users convert a centralized DBMS into a distributed DBMS.

·         Lack of experience

-          General-purpose distributed DBMSs have not been widely accepted, although many of the protocols and problems are well understood. Consequently, we do not yet have the same level of experience in industry as we have with centralized DBMSs. For a prospective adopter of this technology, this may be a significant deterrent.

·         Database design more complex

-          Besides the normal difficulties of designing a centralized database, the design of a distributed database has to take account of fragmentation of data, allocation of fragmentation to specific sites, and data replication.