A look at IBM Information server

IBM Information server 

The IBM information server is released recently and is marketed as SOA enabled complete Information suite that enable customers to extract Intelligence from raw data. The Information server itself is an aggregation of tightly integrated products from the former Ascential suite DB2 related products; these products modified to enable SOA, to provide a consistent user interface and are integrated into the Websphere family.

The list of products that comes with the Information server includes:

Some products from the Ascential suite that are included in the IBM information server are:

 

 Websphere DataStage 8.0 :  

 

This ETL tool might be the product that you will be working mostly on in the Information server. It combines the powerful features of Pipelining and parallelism for a faster ETL process.

 

 Websphere Quality stage :  

The Websphere quality stage is used for data standardization and matching across different sources.

 Websphere Information Analyzer :  

This tool is used extensively for Data profiling and helps to reduce the data inaccuracies in the source systems by laying out data expectation rules.

 Webspehere DataEvent Publisher :  

Primarily used for event based processing. Publishes changes occurred in the subscribed source systems to the interested listeners for event processing.

Repository Administration tools:

 

 Webshpere Shared Metadata Layer/Server : 

 It is the main product in the Information server. The Metastage in the former Ascential suite is transformed into Metadata server. This Metadata server provides a consistent SOA enabled repository for the purposes of Metadata and master data management. More over this is accessible from the other Information Integration server products.

This has to be installed on top of any ORDBMS/RDBMS. The repository itself is object Oriented.

 

 Websphere Business Analyzer: 

It established the mapping between business terms to physical schema.

 Websphere Information Services Director: 

This tool enables Information access and integration process to be published as reusable services in SOA.

Some other DB2 products that are migrated into the Information server include:

 

 Websphere Federation server :  

 

Formerly known as DB2 federation server, it enables integrated view of data across diverse and different distributed data sources and databases. It also supports local caching of the data.

 

 Websphere Replication server:  

This tool is used for replication purposes between different databases and supports event based replication services.

IBM Rational data architect also interacts with the Metadata server for design and data modeling purposes.

 

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