GenevaERS is an enterprise reporting system that currently executes in the

IBM mainframe IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of th ...

z/OS z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest: * ...

environment. It is similar to

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

or Apache Spark but predates their development by a decade. It has been used as a

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integr ...

ETL, reporting, and application development platform. It was designed to support business systems using William McCarthy's theory of

Resources, Events, Agents Resources, events, agents (REA) is a model of how an accounting system can be re-engineered for the computer age. REA was originally proposed in 1982 by William E. McCarthy as a generalized accounting model, and contained the concepts of resources, ...

. GenevaERS was created by

PricewaterhouseCoopers PricewaterhouseCoopers is an international professional services brand of firms, operating as partnerships under the PwC brand. It is the second-largest professional services network in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounti ...

Consulting as part of their practice. (IBM acquired PwC Consulting in 2002.) IBM renamed GenevaERS IBM's Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting (SAFR), marketing and licensing it through its

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division, typically with customer-specific services. The product solves

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical p ...

problems for large operational databases, especially in insurance and financial industries. GenevaERS is also popular among

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a separ ...

and other ERP system users, including manufacturing companies, with large databases and significant reporting needs. (Despite the SAFR name, GenevaERS is not confined to financial industry roles.) In July 2020, IBM contributed the SAFR code base to the Linux Foundation's

Open Mainframe Project Open Mainframe Project is a Collaborative Project managed by the Linux Foundation to encourage the use of Linux-based operating systems and open source software on mainframe computers. The project was announced on August 17, 2015 and was driven b ...

,. GenevaERS uses a "single pass" I/O approach and takes advantage of the IBM mainframe's parallelism to create multiple reports concurrently. The software is CPU-efficient, with an internal capability to execute report queries using generated, high-performance

IBM Z IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z/Architecture mainframe computers. In July 2017, with another generation of products, the official family was changed to IBM Z from IBM z Systems; the IBM Z family now includes the newest mod ...

assembler code. Most GenevaERS users run reports daily, overnight, during a batch window, but jobs can run at any time, including concurrently and without disruption to online workloads. IBM continues to offer a commercial version of GenevaERS under the SAFR name which is able to exploit Additional GenevaERS performance optimizations include in-memory join processing, either direct access or through a technical called Common Key Buffer joins for very large dimensional tables, piping from one process to another, and Extract-Phrase Record Aggregation] to immediately collapse data for summary outputs. Although GenevaERS can access multiple types of mainframe-based data, including IBM Db2, Db2 and

VSAM Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) is an IBM DASD file storage access method, first used in the OS/VS1, OS/VS2 Release 1 (SVS) and Release 2 (MVS) operating systems, later used throughout the Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) architecture and no ...

, like MapReduce, GenevaERS's higher performance comes with the use of sequential files. GenevaERS processes are called VIEWSs, and any number of VIEWs can be run in one pass of the data. These VIEWS can be defined through the graphical user interface termed the Workbench.
Exploiting IBM SAFR to Solve Financial Accounting Challenges
' An IBM Redguide publication, Published 29 September 2010, updated 18 August 2011, Alex Louwe Kooijmans, et al. p. 13-15, 21

References

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External links

Open Mainframe Project: GenevaERS project

GenevaERS.org
project website

Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting Financial reporting IBM mainframe software

See also

References

External links