Data Event Publishing captures changes to source tables and converts committed transactional data to messages in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format or delimited format. Each message can contain an entire transaction or a row-level change.

These messages are put on WebSphere® MQ message queues and read by a message broker or other applications. You can publish subsets of columns and rows from source tables so that you publish only the data that you need.

You can use Data Event Publishing for a variety of purposes that require published data, including feeding central information brokers and web applications, and triggering actions based on updates, inserts, or deletes to source tables.

Source tables can be on DB2® servers on z/OS®, Linux, UNIX, and Windows, or on Oracle databases. WebSphere MQ message queues are used for transporting data from the source system to the system where messages are received.

Data Event Publishing can be very useful in a variety of applications. Consider a scenario in which changing prices and inventory are published to potential buyers. For example, a wholesale food company procures perishable food products such as bananas from world markets in bulk and sells them to grocery food retailers and distributors.

The value of bananas decreases the longer that they are in the warehouse. The wholesaler wants to inform its potential buyers of the changing price and inventory data and can set up Data Event Publishing to do just that. Each time the price changes, an XML or delimited message can be sent to potential buyers, informing them of the "price change event."

The delimited message format for event publishing provides a structure for source table changes that is similar to delimited sequential files, but with the high throughput advantage of WebSphere MQ queues. The default delimiter format is compatible with comma-separated value (CSV) format. For example, you can use InfoSphere® DataStage® to read the messages from queues and process CSV messages for feeding a data warehouse.