Overview

The IBM® InfoSphere® Optim™ solutions include the components Archive, Compare, Edit, and Move. This introduction provides information on how to use Move.

See the System Requirements document at ibm.com® for a complete list of supported platforms and data sources.

Move extracts and inserts referentially intact subsets of complex relational data with ease—no matter how complex the data model. You define the precise set of data to extract using simple or complex selection criteria and save the data to a reusable Extract File.

Move allows you to insert the data into one or more tables, providing total flexibility with respect to the production and test database environments. Move can even create the destination tables automatically.

Because protecting data privacy is critical, companies must mask sensitive test data to avoid severe consequences. Move's masking techniques include using arithmetic expressions, substrings, random or sequential number generation, date aging, and more. Most importantly, you can propagate masked values from a parent table to related tables at all levels—essential for maintaining the referential integrity of the data.

Move uses a two-step process to migrate data: an Extract step and an Insert step.

• The Extract step copies data from one or more related tables in one or more database instances to an external file called an Extract File.
• The Insert step copies data from the Extract File to one or more destination databases. You can copy extracted data back to the source tables, to different tables in the source database, or to tables in a different database. If the destination tables do not exist, Move generates the SQL to create the tables.

Contents

This introduction briefly describes the sample database distributed with Optim and provides an overview of Move's functions, features, and basic processing flow. Extract and Insert steps presented in sample scenarios provide an overview of Move capabilities, including how to:

• Create a test database.
• Populate and update a test database.
• Transform data using literals and aging parameters.

You can use the comprehensive Help facility in Move at any time to obtain more information about a specific topic or function. You can select Help from the menu on most dialogs or right-click and select What's This from the shortcut menu to obtain context-specific help. Help is also available by pressing F1.