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The Warehouse Where No Crime Is Forgotten

A new crime-busting warehouse is helping officers spot crime trends as they develop in real time. IBM 's Crime Information Warehouse (CIW) is a lean, mean data-mining machine that puts all the little pieces of the puzzle together to help police anywhere connect crimes, spot trends, and crack cases faster, sometimes even before new crimes happen.

Police departments excel at capturing information, but there's no efficient structure for dealing with where all that crime data goes afterwards. Critical case information ends up sitting in pockets across many departments and it's left to officers to tirelessly track it down. That's less time spent doing what they were trained to do--solve the crimes.

That's where the CIW steps in. The software solution currently being applied in Richmond, Virginia, New York City, and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, acts as a repository for crime related data, pulling information from multiple standalone systems to give officers a one-stop access point for all their data needs. Integrated crime statistics made available in real time can revolutionize policing tactics, making it "predictive"--if officers can see the trends forming through patterns in the data, they can more likely prevent any further similar crimes.

"Analytics recently identified a neighborhood as having a spike in thefts from vehicles," says John Warden, Manager, Business Performance Section, Edmonton Police Service. "Officers were assigned to go door to door in the area canvassing the occupants for further information. They spent about four high-visibility hours talking to the community residents. No one was arrested or identified as a suspect, but there were no further thefts from vehicles in the area for three weeks."

Data-driven crime prevention began with the introduction of CompStat (computer statistics) by the NYPD in 1993. A multilayered initiative, it employs geographic information systems to generate crime maps that officers can use in weekly meetups to employ new strategies to cut crime. Credited with decreasing felony rates in New York city, the program is successfully being used across many agencies in the U.S. to address spikes in crime.

The CIW [PDF] adds the critical element of speed, mining data in real time to provide a holistic view. IBM developed the solution to synthesize bits of data into actionable intelligence; using GIS mapping, advanced software, and visualization tools, the warehouse can clean, gather, link and sift through large amounts data to discover correlations and patterns, delivering it directly to officers in the field.

The best database for every purpose! | planetIDS.com

As a consultant I often am asked "What is the best database for everything we do?" Unfortunately, there is no easy answer for that, and I know this is not the response you all expect from me. Bear with me on this and I will explain.

The best database, and to be clear by 'database' I mean Database Management System, is not MySQL, PostGreSQL, Ingres, Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2 branded products, IBM's Informix branded products, Voltdb, OpenSQL, Berkeley DB, Progress, Unify, or any of the literally hundreds of other RDBMS products on the market whether they are free or for-cost. No single database product can serve all of the needs of any large organization nor for most smaller organizations. That's a fact! While I think that IBM Informix Dynamic Server Ultimate Edition is the cats meow of RDBMS products, the performance, feature, and innovation leader in my book, it is not best for every purpose in every organization.

So, the question remains out there: "What is the best database for ...", what do I recommend? Because if my clients have to use a different database server product for each group of applications that fit best, or even groupings that are sometimes second best, they are still going to have to maintain and be able to manage and tune several products from several companies won't they? The list of skill sets that their DBAs will need will be very broad and I will have to hire more DBAs than I might need if I could just use one product.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I keep coming back to the marketing presentation I made to IBM two years ago and to how appropriate that was to this question even more so than to the question of how IBM should market its database products. If my clients could get the "right" database, or close enough, for every situation from a single vendor, and if that vendor could make the skills needed to manage all of those database products they market sufficiently portable, that would reduce my clients' costs of ownership substantially making this single vendor solution even more attractive.

OK, so what product lines are out there? Oracle effectively has MySQL for very small projects and their Enterprise Class Oracle server in its various "editions". Sybase has an Enterprise class server and a mobile server. Ingres has only an Enterprise class server but not much third party software support left. Progress is a good SMB server only. Same with Unify. PostGreSQL has many nice enterprise class features but not all and many organizations won't bet the ranch on an open source product that doesn't have corporate support behind it. That brings us to IBM which, as I pointed out two years ago, has a plethora or database management systems appropriate for any size organization and any task: C-ISAM and IMS for application level databases. IBM Informix Standard Edition for small business.  Clean simple OLTP performance for simple schema databases serving up to several hundred users with zero maintenance. IBM Informix OnLine for small to medium business.  Clean simple OLTP performance for simple schema databases up to several TB in size serving up to several thousand users with extremely low maintenance and outstanding reliability and uptime. IBM Informix Dynamic Server (Innovator, Growth/Choice, and Ultimate Editions) for: Medium to large business OLTP performance and reliability Medium to large Data Warehouse Large Data Mart and DSS applications Object Relational features Industry leading expandability and extendability Industry leading uptime and reliability with near zero unplanned outage and very low planned outage requirements Industry leading TCO requiring 1/2 to 1/4 the DBA support of other RDBMS products Databases up to 128PB serving many thousands of concurrent users Industry leading replication and clustering technology that scales better than the competition Unmatched embeddability with configurable footprint IBM DB2 Mainframe for mainframe based applications IBM DB2 LUW which fills most of the same niches as Informix Dynamic Server  Strength in 3rd party application support Very large data warehouses. Distributed server DB2 Pure Scale highly scalable clustering IBM Informix Ultimate Warehouse Edition with the Informix Warehouse Accelerator for accelerating complex data warehouse style queries by up to 300X without losing Informix's OLTP performance and features and without requiring expensive special purpose hardware. Netizza provides performance even beyond Informix Ultimate Warehouse for dedicated DW applications that need ultimate speed.

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