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IMS – Information Management System – has been around for quite some time. In fact it’ll be 42 in August. Isn’t 42 the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything? Anyway, IMS runs on IBM mainframes and provides an incredibly fast hierarchical database system and an excellent transaction processing system. And in the intervening 41 years and 10 months there have been enormous improvements not only to the way it works, but also to the thinking behind what can be done with it.

Anyone working with IMS will be able to explain to you the different types of database that exist. They’ll talk at length about Full-function databases, Fast-path databases, and High-availability fast path databases. In addition to this database side of IMS, they will also be able to explain how the transaction management system works – how end users can access information and how messages are queued to make this possible. This is great, but what IMS professionals also need is some way of ensuring they keep up-to-date with what else IMS can do. What IMS will be able to do next year when it’s 43 and work towards that.

One easy way is for IMS professionals to join the Virtual IMS Connection user group at www.virtualims.com. This user group has virtual meetings every other month, so that members can watch presentations without needing to leave their office – all they need is an Internet-enabled PC and a telephone. Most of these Webinars take place at 10:30 Central Time and last around an hour.

As well as seeing a presentation by another IMS professional and the ability to ask as many technical questions as they want, they are also kept up-to-date with the latest product announcements (new products or new versions or releases of existing products) and latest IMS-related articles appearing in the press. On the Web site they can find jobs or people looking for jobs and (added quite recently) they can find consultants available for work.

The next meeting of the Virtual IMS Connection user group will be on the 8th June, and the meeting includes a presentation by Patrick Fournier of SysperTec Communications, who will be discussing “Improving the performance, efficiency, and TCO of SOA integration for IMS applications”.

The presentation will look at:

• Web-enabling IMS and other 3270 applications.
• Providing a way to serve IMS application screens on thin-client Web browsers.
• Developing Web 2.0 user interfaces that combine IMS 3270 data flows with AJAX functionality and JavaScript widgets.
• Creating interactive bi-directional connections between IMS and Web applications, eg Web applications that consume IMS transaction.

In a constantly changing industry, the only way to stay up-to-date and to keep your skills honed is join these regular Webinars. And being a virtual meeting, you don’t have to convince your company to fund your user group experience.

If you’re an IMS professional, it makes sense to join the user group and take part in a free Webinar.

The IBM DB2 Universal Database, or (UDB), for the z/OS Version 8 and its feature, DB2 Query Management Facility, or (QMF), V8.1, became generally available during 2004. Both of them have been improved upon their predecessors and help to streamline the operation of an enterprise.

The DB2 UBD continues to deliver rich function for scalability and highly available date to your e-business applications. Combine this with the power and capacity of the zSeries platform and the z/OS, you can expect to have the ability to extend and expand your applications in this increasingly competitive on-demand environment. DB2 UBD for the z/OS allows you to make changes to the database, like adding a partition without outage, for example. There is no need to drop a re-define as you can simply altar your table and off you go.

The DB2 Utilities Suite offers some valuable tools that deliver full support for DB2 UDB for the z/OS V8. It supports features such as Unicode catalogue, long names and statements, schema evolution and indexing. The Suite also includes partitioning enhancements. Along with that, the DB2 Utility Suite comes with some improvements to its Restart that increase its autonomic capabilities and online schema support that lets reconciliation between DB2 catalogue/directory and table space.

In this release, substantial security changes have prompted the additional multi level security which provides security at a row level which improves flexibility for e-business. Applications that need more granularity security or mandatory control are addressed by row-level granularity. For those customers who need more flexible security, they can use the new special registers along with the new session variables to provide secure information to views, triggers, stored procedures and user Defined Functions. As an added bonus, new encryption options are available.

DB2 Query Management Facility V8.1
the QMF analysis package for the DB2 V8.1 provides effective visualized data in response to simple or complex business queries. The new version of QMF includes the following improvements:

* Support for the DB2 UDB V8, which includes DB2 cube views, long names, Unicode, improvements to SQL Unicode along with improvements to SQL
* Drag-and-drop building of OLAP analytics, SQL queries, pivot tables, and other business analysis reports
* Visual data “appliances,” like executive dashboards, for example, that offer unique, visually rich, interactive functionality and interfaces specific to virtually any type of information task
* Database explorer for easier browsing and identifying database assets along with any other objects they may reference
* QMF for WebSphere, that can help allow ordinary Web browsers to become zero-maintenance thin clients for visual on demand access to enterprise DB2 business data

Services

Both IBM Global Services and IBM DB2 Information Management Services provide fee-based services to help you achieve your business goals. They can supply the skills needed to help you meet your service-level expectations and achieve business success.

Consultants have the ability to assist your technicians with the migration from V7 to V8. Migration readiness assessment and technical migration are both included in IBM services for IBM DB2 V8. This includes installations, migration steps, deployment of new V8 functions, validation of data access paths and performance in compatibility mode to final migrations in Enable New Function mode, or ENF. It’s advised to carry out an IBM System Health Check to ensure a successful migration before you finish your migration project.

To summarise, on demand business in a few words mean resilient, integrated, open, virtualised and autonomic information and processing right this instant. The primary source of that resilience is improved availability, whilst integration for the DB2 is business integration. That is, connecting data, legacy systems and business applications.