Information icon IBM Information Server, Version 8.1
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WebSphere Federation Server

IBM® Information Server provides industry-leading federation in its WebSphere® Federation Server suite component to enable enterprises to access and integrate diverse data and content, structured and unstructured, mainframe and distributed, public and private, as if it were a single resource.

Because of mergers and acquisitions, hardware and software improvements, and architectural changes, organizations often must integrate diverse data sources into a unified view of the data and ensure that information is always available, when and where it is needed, by people, processes, and applications.

Data federation aims to efficiently join data from multiple heterogeneous sources, leaving the data in place and avoiding data redundancy. The source data remains under the control of the source systems and is pulled on demand for federated access.

A federated system has several important advantages:

Time to market
Applications that work with a federated server can interact with a single virtual data source. Without federation, applications must interact with multiple sources by using different interfaces and protocols. Federation can help reduce development time significantly.
Reduced development and maintenance costs
With federation, an integrated view of diverse sources is developed once and leveraged multiple times while it is maintained in a single place, which allows a single point of change.
Performance advantage
By using advanced query processing, a federated server can distribute the workload among itself and the data sources that it works with. The federated server determines which part of the workload is most effectively run by which server to speed performance.

PDF This topic is also in the IBM Information Server Introduction.

Update icon Last updated: 2008-09-15