Where InfoSphere Federation Server fits in the suite architecture

InfoSphere® Federation Server provides a single view of your enterprise by virtually consolidating enterprise data from multiple disparate sources. InfoSphere Federation Server provides access to data from diverse sources and integrates with other InfoSphere Information Server components to simplify data integration.

By using InfoSphere Federation Server, users can access, join, and manipulate data of different formats such as relational, XML, flat files, and web services.

As middleware, InfoSphere Federation Server presents enterprise data to end users as if they were accessing a single source. Wrappers enable almost any type of data source to be consolidated without interruption to existing applications and systems. Users can create a single query to incorporate data from multiple sources, such as sales, customer information, and reports. Security policies can be implemented and used throughout the unified view of the enterprise to simplify access and restriction to data.

By incorporating InfoSphere Information Services Director, users can deploy federation logic as reusable services for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This integration provides a single point of access for multiple data sources and accelerates application development.

Each service is published by defining operations completed by an operations provider. InfoSphere Information Services Director agents contain handlers to process service requests from InfoSphere DataStage®, InfoSphere QualityStage®, IBM® Db2®, InfoSphere Federation Server, Oracle, and IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server.

Data integration specialists can access InfoSphere Federation Server directly in an ETL job by using InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage Designer to incorporate data federation.