IBM Information Integration Technology Principles and Applications

Author: Liu Jingwei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: In recent years, the rapid development of the Internet and e-commerce has led to an explosive growth in the volume and variety of information available to enterprise applications. Many companies have found it difficult to scale their systems to handle the increasing amount and diversity of data they manage. The current challenge for enterprises is information integration. Enterprise applications must be able to interact with databases, application servers, content management systems, data warehouses, workflow management systems, search engines, message queues, web crawlers, mining and analysis packages, and other enterprise integration applications. They must use a wide range of programming interfaces, understand multiple languages and formats, and extract and combine data in various formats generated by multiple delivery mechanisms. Clearly, the boundaries traditionally existing between database management systems, content management systems, intermediate caches, data warehouses, and other data management systems are becoming increasingly blurred. Enterprises urgently need a platform that can provide a unified view of all these services and their data.
Simply put from a technical perspective, today's enterprise systems extend far beyond the scope of the enterprise data center, including customers, suppliers, business partners, and electronic markets. These systems interact with databases, application servers, content management systems, data warehouses, workflow systems, search engines, message queues, web crawlers, mining and analysis packages, and other enterprise applications. They require a large number of programming interfaces (ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), JDBC (Java Database Connectivity), web services, Java objects, J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition)), as well as collaboration with a wide range of data models and languages (SQL (Structured Query Language), XML (Extensible Markup Language), XPath (XML Path Language), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)). These systems can provide data with different time attributes, such as real-time (stock tickers, news wires), current (databases), slightly outdated (intermediate caches, database replication), and historical (data warehouses) data. Data is generated through various delivery mechanisms, such as applications, databases, files, CD-ROMs, continuous data feeds, email, and web downloads, and comes in diverse formats (e.g., relational tables, XML documents, images, video files, audio files).
This book introduces a new generation of information management technology—information integration—providing a comprehensive overview of the concepts and techniques of information integration. In terms of concepts, it delves into the emergence and development of information integration theory, introduces the architecture and key technologies of IBM's information integration, and compares various integration methods in the industry, elaborating on the expansion of information integration for data warehouses. In terms of technology, it focuses primarily on the practical operations of IBM's information integration technology. The book provides a detailed introduction to core federation technologies, describes the specific steps for integrating various heterogeneous data sources, and offers explanations and examples of MQ and web service integration. Additionally, it covers performance optimization.
This book is suitable for system designers, planners, and application developers who are familiar with basic database technologies.