Before you start

Learn what to expect from this tutorial, and how to get the most out of it.

About this tutorial

IBM® WebSphere Federation Server provides real-time, virtualized access to disparate data sources. As a result, you benefit from delivering new projects with a much shorter time to market, extending your warehouse with ad-hoc queries, and producing a unified view for your enterprise data.

With the XML Federation feature, WebSphere Federation Server Version 9.5 provides direct access to remote XML data in DB2 and XML documents. You can create a relational nickname over a remote table or view that contains the XML data type. You can also use the XML wrapper to create a nonrelational nickname that contains the XML data type over XML documents.

You can use these nicknames in the XQuery and SQL languages. The XQuery language is the primary mechanism for querying XML documents. You can use SQL to perform basic operations, such as selecting XML columns, and inserting, updating, or deleting XML data. You can also integrate SQL and XQuery to create queries for both existing relational data and XML data by using SQL/XML functions and predicates, and XQuery functions.

In addition, you can perform a sub-document update, which allows portions of an XML document to be updated. Also, the federated server can validate remote XML data. XML validation is the process of determining whether the structure, content, and data types of an XML document are valid. Finally, with annotated XML schema decomposition, you can decompose documents in columns of one or more nicknames.

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Objectives

Take advantage of this XML Federation feature in WebSphere Federation Server Version 9.5. Using a scenario about books, inventory, and reviews, you will walk through various use cases to demonstrate the use of the SQL/XML and the XQuery languages to manipulate your remote XML data. This tutorial also covers related XML support such as IMPORT, EXPORT, XML schema validation, and decomposition. For those of you who would like to try out the examples, the Appendix includes sample data and configuration scripts.

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Prerequisites

You should have prior knowledge and experience working with DB2 and WebSphere Federation Server.

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System requirements

You must have WebSphere Federation Server Version 9.5 installed and running on your machine. You also need to have a DB2 9.1 instance and database available as a remote DB2 data source to be accessed in the examples. Alternatively, you can also use another database on the same WebSphere Federation Server Version 9.5 instance as the remote DB2 data source.

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• Work with remote XML data
• XML validation
• Annotated XML schema decomposition
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Sample data and configuration scripts
• Resources
• About the authors

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• Try: DB2 Enterprise
• Demo: Create an electronic form solution with DB2 pureXML and Lotus Forms
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• Buy: DB2 Enterprise

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