LOTS of ways to replicate from VSAM to Oracle. You said "real time or near real time," to get the updates to VSAM sent down the wire to Oracle. One conceptual approach is "event publishing," i.e. to capture the events (VSAM updates), perhaps selectively, then push some or all of the information across a wire, ideally via something reliable (so your warehouse doesn't miss information).
IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Classic Event Publisher and IBM CICS Business Event Publisher for MQSeries are two such products. They trap updates to VSAM, wrap up the update information into a nice XML package (according to desired rules, formatting, and selection), and push it out to any arbitrary MQ queue(s). (MQ is nice for this because the warehouse can be offline and updates can still queue up and unspool later. It's also timely, so you don't have to wait for a nightly extract. And it's workload friendly: if the warehouse can't keep up with the feed, no immediate worries.) Event publishing is a non-intrusive approach (i.e. no application code changes). That's one approach. There are others, including ETL tools which have their own pros/cons. Or coming in through the front door (i.e. CICS). And if you're a strong architecturally-oriented shop, the fashion (with good cause, I think) is to look at ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) type approaches, because "connecting X to Y in manner Z" is a loop-repeat sort of affair for most enterprises. I should also mention that there's a strong movement toward in-place data warehousing/business intelligence. Of course the mainframe was the only way to do business intelligence for years, and then we entered a period of time where there was a lot of copying offboard for analysis. Copying has a fundmental problem, though, which is that as soon as you do it the information is old. (That may or may not matter, but increasingly it matters.) Now the pendulum is swinging back for a variety of reasons (security and privacy, escalating total costs for distributed systems and decreasing total costs for mainframe systems, increasing quality requirements such as "five 9s" on the warehouse, etc.) The zIIP is the latest example (accelerating star schema queries in DB2), and I expect it's just the opening salvo in a stepped-up push to bring more BI work to the mainframe. Frankly this is happening because a lot of customers are demanding it. Geneva ERS for z/OS is an example of a business intelligence tool which can process VSAM (and other mainframe data sources) and generate reports extremely rapidly. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
