Data distribution and Web access

The ability to distribute data and provide Web access to that data is vital to service providers and their customers.

An electric company provides electricity to a large geographic region. Working out of a single office, the company's customer service representatives answer customer calls and submit requests for service. The electric company has hundreds of field representatives who provide service at customer locations. The field representatives work out of many local offices, and they need access to customer service requests that the central office receives.

The customer service representatives document customer requests on their workstations, which have DB2 Connect Personal Edition. This information is uploaded to Db2 for z/OS®. The field representatives can then use Java™ applications to access the customer request information in Db2 from their local offices.

In this scenario, the electric company's distributed environment relies on the distributed data facility (DDF), which is part of Db2 for z/OS. Db2 applications can use DDF to access data at other Db2 sites and at remote relational database systems that support Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA). DRDA is a standard for distributed connectivity. An organization called The Open Group developed the standard, with active participation from many companies in the industry, one of which was IBM®. All IBM Db2 data servers support this DRDA standard.

DDF also enables applications that run in a remote environment that supports DRDA. These applications can use DDF to access data in Db2 servers. Examples of application requesters include IBM DB2 Connect and other DRDA-compliant client products.