IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data & AI organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:


Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,


Post your ideas

Post ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,

  1. Post an idea

  2. Upvote ideas that matter most to you

  3. Get feedback from the IBM team to refine your idea


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com


Add a new idea Subscribe
Status Delivered
Workspace Knowledge Catalog
Created by Guest
Created on Dec 6, 2017

RELATED IDEAS

Support a WDP (or WDP Catalog) connection type that can be consumed by 3rd party tools

We are building WDP Business Metrics Dashboard and wish to use WDP to manage the large number of data sources through the data catalog. However, to completely build this dashboard, we are require to use 3rd party tools in conjunction with WDP. These 3rd party tools expect "connections" to be added to the tool. It would be good if we could add a single "WDP Connection" type within the tool to point our created WDP catalog. Right now we can not use WDP because we have to add the individual data sources to the tool itself. If we could just add the one WDP source and have the catalog manage the data/connections, this would make the tool very powerful and usable through these external tools.

To provide a little real world example we are using Looker for much of our graphing. We can add individual sources like db2WoC and db2 etc. We want to add a single type WDP as well so that we can manage the data from a single repository. Obviously this requires support from the 3rd party tool providers however we have to enable them to do this.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Dec 14, 2018

    OK, Understood...thanks for the additional detail. 

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Dec 14, 2018

    Hi Jay. No that is not exactly what I am asking for. I want sources in a WDP catalog to be treated as a single connection in the 3rd party tool. Without that I am simply adding individual connections to my tool and not using the catalog at all. Let me provide a few more details to my example. Looker is a full fledged dashboarding tool similar to Cognos. In order to use looker I need to add connections to data sources directly in the tool. Today I can add db2 dbs, dashDB dbs, oracle dbs, SQLserver dbs, Postgres dbs  etc sources. They are basically source types that looker supports. Since I am already putting most of the sources into WDP through the catalog (hoping to use WDP and its features), I would like to have access to those sources in Looker but using/through the catalog. To do this today I just add the individual sources directly into my tool and and bypass WDP altogether. This means that I can't use any of the WDP features including governance. While I could call the API to get the source information, it really serves no purpose as once I pull this information, I am no longer using WDP.  What would be useful is if I could just add a single connection (type WDP) as a source into Looker, similar to what I do today for db2 type, dashdb type etc.  This means I am basically connecting to the WDP/catalog and WDP would know how to manipulate the sources to feed to my tool data. Without it, my tool doesn't really need WDP nor would we really want to use it (too many extra hops). (Yes I do understand that this does require 3rd party tools to support this new connection type). As a customer, if I have a 3rd party tools that requires connections, why would I use WDP or the catalog if much if what I do has to be outside of the catalog/WDP. Enabling a single source connection type enabled vendors to support WDP  means these tools can not use WDP instead of bypassing.

    Note: This is just one example, however many 3rd party tools would fall into this category. Many tools need connection sources. If they have to be added directly instead of through WDP, then they are not really using WDP. I am likely not explaining this one very well. If you want to chat for more details let me know.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Dec 14, 2018

    Hi Michael - Just so I am clear you are saying that you would like an external connection into the catalog called WDP connection. That 3rd parties could use to pull their WDP catalog information into their own tools. This would be possible today through usage of our catalog API's, although it is not as easy to consume at the moment as just creating an instance of a WDP Connection object....can you please confirm this description is what you require...thanks

By clicking the "Post Comment" or "Submit Idea" button, you are agreeing to the IBM Ideas Portal Terms of Use.
Do not place IBM confidential, company confidential, or personal information into any field.