Introduction

The IBM® InfoSphere Optim™ solutions manage enterprise data throughout every stage of the information lifecycle, enabling your company to assess, classify, subset, archive, store, and access enterprise application data.

Using the archiving features in the Optim solution, you can accomplish the following tasks:

• Isolate historical data from current activity and safely remove it to a secure archive.
• Access archived historical data easily with familiar tools and interfaces.
• Restore archived data to its original business context when it requires more processing.

The Optim test data management capabilities provide an efficient alternative to database cloning, allowing you to create development and testing environments that are sized appropriately.

Optim helps you achieve these benefits with the following components: Archive, Move, Edit, and Compare.

• Archive is used to identify and archive sets of relationally intact data before you remove selected data from your database. Archived data is indexed and stored. You can browse, search, and restore selected subsets of archived data.
• Move extracts and migrates sets of relationally intact data. Using Move, you can create test databases that are referentially intact subsets of a production database. You can also extract sets of related data and transform it as you migrate the data to the test database.
• Edit is used to browse and edit sets of relationally intact data in database tables. Using Edit, you can edit data, review logical application paths, and browse data to ensure that application test results are as expected. Edit supports your rapid development of applications, allows you to analyze the structure of your database, and facilitates your browsing of precisely defined segments of relational data.
• Compare facilitates comparisons of sets of relationally intact data. The Compare component compares data results from application tests to the original data and highlights all differences. Compare allows you to rapidly analyze the effects of your application software or modifications to it.

The Scheduler is used to schedule Optim processes to run periodically, in sequence, or both. This feature allows you to run selected processes at a convenient time or regularly.

The Optim Server is used to define tasks on workstations and direct any resource-intensive data-processing functions to a machine more suited to the task. This machine can be one on which the database is located, eliminating associated network traffic, or a machine that is dedicated to the Server function.

The Configuration program provides a way to configure workstations (including machines that host the Server) to use Optim. Using the Configuration program, you can also maintain and customize the Optim environment.

The Optim solution is easy to use, simple in concept, yet powerful in supporting complex database structures. Intuitive dialogs simplify data entry tasks and provide options for processing relationally intact sets of data. Intelligent window handling technology allows you to display multiple dialogs, windows, context-sensitive online help, and tutorials.

Depending on your licensing agreement, you can use one or more components of Optim.