Federated databases, such as IBM's DataJoiner, are being used to provide rapid, cost effective access to this data across a variety of business types. 1 Introduction This presentation discusses the who, why, and how of federated database exploitation with a focus on problems encountered and impediments to deployment. Who Users of federation range across industries from manufacturing, to finance, to retail, and more. Why Applications want their business data to appear as a coherent whole rather than as 'islands of data', They want to access that data with high functionality, in a uniform way that is supported by existing development tools, environments, and people. If that data is in a 'legacy' database they want that same set of high level functions, and they don't want to touch existing users of that data.
Federation is used to provide that access and preserve the investment in 'legacy' systems.
4 How Uses of federation can be divided into intelligent gateways, replication, and on-line access. Intelligent gateway users want a uniform query language and a high level of abstraction. They want to learn one query language and use that to access all their data via the federation. Federation provides replication support by enabling transparent access to the replication source or target, thus making it easier to create replication tools. It also enables new replication capability by enabling replication to or from a multiple database view.