Introduction

This book is a simple introduction to a simple system. Make no mistake; the word simple is used here in its most positive and powerful context, because the best way to wrap your mind around a complex problem is to simplify it; Break it down into more manageable pieces and then master those constituent parts. Divide and conquer. This is a technique you instinctively use to solve everyday problems, and which is equally relevant for engineering information exchange across an office, an enterprise or the globe.

If you are impatient to quickly start extracting information from files, directories, databases or Lotus Notes and transferring this data someplace else then you may want to skip directly to the appendix, EasyETL Guide. This feature lets you harness the power of IBM® Tivoli® Directory Integrator without having to first learn core concepts. Instead you choose your source and target, and then press Run and watch your data flow. If on the other hand you want more control over how data is read, filtered, enriched, transformed and moved then continue reading here; EasyETL Guide will still be there for your future reading pleasure.

IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator¹ is designed and built on the premise that even the most complex integration problems can be decomposed down into three basic parts:

• The systems involved in the communication – also called data sources,
• The data flows between these systems,
• The events that trigger the data flows.

With IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator you translate this atomic understanding of the integration problem directly into a solution, building it incrementally, one flow at a time, with continuous feedback and verification. This approach makes integration projects easier to estimate and plan, sometimes reducing this effort to the counting and costing the individual data flows to be implemented. Completing a task in runnable steps also allows you to regularly demonstrate progress to stakeholders.

IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator further accelerates development by abstracting away the technical differences between your data sources, allowing you to spend more time concentrating on the business requirements.

Leveraging the power of Eclipse, the IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator development environment is both comprehensive and extensible. Integration projects result in libraries of components and business logic that can be quickly reused to address new challenges. As a result, teams across your organization can share IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator assets, resulting in independent projects – even point solutions – that immediately fit into a coherently integrated and managed infrastructure.

This document gives you an introduction to the simplify and solve methodology described above. You will also take your first steps toward tapping into the elegant simplicity of the Tivoli Directory Integrator toolset, specifically these two programs:

• The development environment, called the Configuration Editor, or 'CE' for short,
• The run-time engine, simply referred to as the Server.

You will assemble your Tivoli Directory Integrator solutions with the CE, while one or more Servers are used to power them. These programs work in concert, making the user experience seamless, and even allowing you to work across platforms; for example, developing on your laptop while testing and debugging solutions running remotely on a mainframe.

C:\Program Files\IBM\TDI\V7.1.1\examples\Tutorial