InfoSphere Federation Server

InfoSphere® Federation Server enables your organization to access and integrate diverse data and content as if it were a single resource.

Federation, also known as enterprise information integration, provides an optimized and transparent data access and transformation layer with a single relational interface across enterprise data.

Applications that work with a federated server can interact with a single virtual data source, greatly reducing development time and maintenance costs. Your organization can develop a single, integrated view of diverse sources and reuse the view in multiple places to create a single point of change.

InfoSphere Federation Server uses the metadata of source systems to automate the building and compiling of federated queries. Metadata enables tracing and auditing throughout the federation process. Federated queries can scale to run against any volume of information by using the parallel processing engine of InfoSphere Information Server.

By using a federated system, you can send distributed requests to multiple data sources within a single SQL statement. For example, you can join data that is in an IBM Db2 table, an Oracle table, a web service, and an XML file in a single SQL statement.