Sources of data

Access to heterogeneous data is a powerful asset for any organization that has data in various sources.

Db2 for Linux®, UNIX, and Windows supports access to many different data sources with a single SQL statement. This support is called federated database support, which is provided by InfoSphere® Information Integration products. For example, with federated database support, you can join data from a wide variety of data sources. The application (and the application developer) does not need to understand where the data is or the SQL differences across different data stores. Federated data support includes support for the following relational and nonrelational data sources:
  • All Db2 data server products
  • IMS
  • Informix®
  • Oracle
  • Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Excel
  • Sybase
  • JDBC
  • Databases that supports JDBC API
  • OLE DB
  • Teradata
  • EMC Documentum

If you also use InfoSphere Federation Server, your applications that access the Db2 DBMS can have read-write access to additional data sources, web services, and WebSphere® Business Integration. Access to heterogeneous, or dissimilar, data means that applications can accomplish more, with less code. The alternative would be that programmers would write multiple programs, each of which accesses data in one of the sources. Then the programmers would write another program that would merge the results together.