Information Integration and XML in IBM's DB2

Publisher Summary Due to organizational or operational constraints, the diverse data sources that an enterprise uses do not generally lend themselves to being fully replicated or completely consolidated under a single database, hence the increased demand for data interchange and for federated access to distributed sources. IBM has ongoing work in information integration technology that enables integrated, real-time access to traditional and emerging data sources, transforms information to meet the needs of business analysts, and manages data placement for performance, currency, and availability leading to fast, constant, and easy access for customer e-business solutions. IBM's Information Integration infrastructure today supports SQL—a mature, powerful query language—plus a number of SQL extensions in support of XML. SQL and SQL extensions for specific datatypes (such as XML or image) support access to any type of data object: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured.