Datasheet

Ascential Software

DataStage XE
The solution to enterprise data integration: Any source, any target, any time

<DataStage XE >

Your companys profitability hinges on the ability to act swiftly, based on a complete, accurate knowledge of the business. Unfortunately, the critical information required to make these decisions is scattered throughout the enterprise, across multiple applications, departments and divisions. And while each source system contains pieces to the overall puzzle of enterprise profitability, each is a distinct silo with a gulf of incompatibility separating them. You understand the value of leveraging all your corporate information; you recognize the promise of reconciling all your data into a single consolidated view. But the path to getting there is harder to see. Thats why so many organizations like yours are still struggling to get the desired ROI from their CRM, ERP, data warehousing, BI/analytics and other strategic business applications. Each system calls for data in different formats each system defines its data differently no means are available to assess the ripple affect of changes to data at the source no way to communicate changes to downstream information users. Its confusion on a mammoth scaleand its preventing your company from getting what it needs to gain a competitive advantage. Until now.

enterprise applications like CRM, SCM, and ERP, DataStage XE helps ensure the success of your enterprise data integration initiatives. The DataStage XE solution delivers three core capabilities necessary for success in enterprise data integration: Advanced maintenance and development, which simplifies administration and speeds implementation; end-to-end meta data management, which provides the backbone for the way data is managed and communicated throughout the company; and data quality assurance, to manage data consistency and integrity through the integration process and beyond.

The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite transforms your corporate data into Intelligent Information information that is reliable, relevant, and completeso you can make the best business decisions possible to drive success. Thats because its the only integrated solution that addresses the full life cycle of data integration, with products that provide automated data profiling, data quality and cleansing, and data transformation. And its built on a core platform of services that offers unlimited scalability, end-to-end meta data management, and complete connectivity between any data source and application.

Introducing DataStage XE
DataStage XE is part of Ascentials Enterprise Integration Suite, the industry's only scalable solution that spans the entire integration life cycle. DataStage XE delivers the capability to tightly integrate enterprise information, regardless of the sources, targets and time frames. Whether youre building an enterprise data warehouse to support the information needs of the entire company, or integrating dozens of source systems to support

Figure 1: DataStage XE is the solution of choice for complex data integration challenges.

The Industrys Most Powerful Solution

DataStage XE supports the collection, integration and transformation of high volumes of data, with data structures ranging from simple to highly complex. DataStage XE manages data arriving within seconds of being acquired, as well as massive quantities of data that flood the system, in daily, weekly or monthly processing intervals. Multiple Source and Target Support DataStage XE supports a virtually unlimited number of heterogeneous data sources and targets in a single job. If its in your enterprise, its supported. Advanced Data Type Management The DataStage XE architecture treats complex data structures, such as click stream data or XML, like any other enterprise data source, further enhancing support for a single enterprise solution. Real Time Data Integration Support DataStage XE can operate in real-time, capturing messages or extracting data at a moments notice on the same platform that also integrates bulk data. This provides a key advantage over competing offerings that require the use of two separate tools to achieve the same functionality.

DataStage XE cuts the time processing requirements and linearly increases speed of throughput for integrating massive amounts of data. It also boosts developer productivity by eliminating the need to code new applications to run in parallela costly process that often requires the expertise of specialists. Development is done using sequential logic and the deployment configuration automatically adds the desired degree of parallelism.

Advanced Maintenance and Development

DataStage XE features a powerful architecture that gives developers maximum speed, flexibility and effectiveness in building, deploying, updating and managing their data integration infrastructure. The productivity-enhancing features in DataStage XE reduce the learning curve, simplify administration, and optimize the use of development resources resulting in a decreased development and maintenance cycle for data integration applications. As a result, DataStage XE enables companies to spend less time developing their integration and more time reaping the benefits of it. Complete Development Environment The DataStage XE design metaphor is characterized best by the phrase "work as you think." A robust graphical palette helps developers diagram the flow of data through their environment via GUIdriven drag-and-drop design. Developers also benefit from a versatile scripting language, powerful DataStage XE's end-to-end meta debugging capabilities, and an open data sharing among all the tools application programming interface (API) for leveraging external code. that make up the data integration

Extensibility For Highly Scalable Parallel Processing

DataStage XE, in conjunction with the optional Parallel Extender package, enables companies to solve large-scale business problems through high-performance processing of massive data volumes. By leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of multiprocessor hardware platforms, DataStage XE can scale to satisfy the demands of ever growing data volumes and ever shrinking batch windows.

life cycle ensures that all relevant meta data is connected for a clear, unambiguous picture of your business.

DataStage XE

Figure 2: This Impact Analysis diagram traces the usages of the Table Definition "Customer Detail" from the perspective of various tools ERwin and DataStage.

Powerful Pre-built Functions DataStage XE features the industrys most extensive data integration development environment, with a library of more than 300 pre-built functions and routines that allows developers to simply pick and choose. Reuse, Versioning and Sharing DataStage XE shortens the development cycle by promoting reuse of existing data integration business logic. This works through the concept of containers, which allow jobs and meta data created in one container to be shared and reused by other jobs. Versioning extends the development, test and deployment of jobs among multiple developers or DataStage XE servers. Event-based Scheduling Administrators can schedule any DataStage XE job using its built-in calendar-based, graphical or command-line scheduling capability. Alternatively, DataStage XE can be managed directly using any enterprise-class scheduling tool.

to present these in various formats and mediums, including web publishing.

Enterprise End-To-End Meta Data

Meta data integration is the glue of the data integration infrastructure, crucial for maintaining consistent, clear and accurate analytic interpretations. DataStage XEs end-to-end meta data sharing among all tools within the data integration lifecycle ensures that all relevant meta data is connected for a clear, unambiguous picture of your business. DataStage XEs meta data management features help you manage your data assets by providing consistent and accurate meta data. It reduces the overhead of storing and updating meta data in many separate catalogs by permitting the meta data to be shared across tools. The meta data analysis and management capabilities of DataStage XE ensure integration and reuse of business rules across the entire business intelligence infrastructure for a seamless solution without requiring custom code. Unlike competitive integration tools, which cannot capture the complete meta data picture across an entire integration process due to their ETL-only bias, DataStage XE avoids the confusion and conflicting definitions of these other approaches by providing users with unique meta data sharing capabilities which are not constrained by just an ETL tool perspective. This means users gain the fullest semantic integration possible among modeling tools, ETL tools, and end-user reporting tools, ensuring that no valuable, rich meta data is lost and that business managers make critical decisions based on the best common understanding of their data. Cross tool impact analysis and data lineage reporting accrue as a natural by-product of this unique approach to meta data integration. This capabilityacross the entire integration lifecycle processis unique to Ascential, and significantly enhances the productivity of developers and business analysts in managing the inevitable changes that occur on a regular basis.

Integrated Data Quality Assurance

Data changes. Structures change. And over time, the quality of data can erode, putting critical information at risk. DataStage XEs quality assurance capabilities monitor the quality of data through the integration and beyond, to highlight and track data quality issues that materially affect the success of the integration Automated Data Quality Evaluation DataStage XE performs automated domain analysis to determine exactly what is present in the actual data values within a data environment. Rule Conformance DataStage XE enables the testing of the data within and across data environments for the adherence to enterprise business rules and standards. It looks at the interrelationships of data elements to determine if they satisfy the data relationships that the business requires. DataStage XE tests the dataand relationships between datawithin and across environments to ensure complete compliance with business rules and standards Measurement and Presentation of Data Quality Impacts Evaluation is the cornerstone of data quality. What is the condition of the data? How did it get corrupted? DataStage XE enables you to answer just these questions. And thanks to a robust metric facility, it enables you to assess the relative impact and cost of data quality in a quantifiable way. As a result, you have the means to prioritize and gauge the most effective methods for improvement. Reporting and graphical capabilities provide display features

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Meta Data Integration DataStage XE provides maximum meta data integration and sharing among the industrys most popular data modeling, data integration and business intelligence tools and standards. This detailed level of sharing enables users to take advantage of true "end-to-end" meta data integration across the enterprise. Cross-tool Impact Analysis Within DataStage XE, developers can perform in-depth dependency analysis to rapidly assess the impact of a change from a data warehouse, back to the operational data store, back to the staging database, all the way to the original data sources and the data-modeling tool (such as AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler) that might have been used to specify them. (See Figure 2.) This delivers the functionality necessary to ensure that changes to data structures do not corrupt critical downstream reports. Data Lineage Using a meta data management graphical display, DataStage XE gives end users a full view of the datas history so they can judge how it affects business analysis. In short, data lineage answers the question, "Where did this data come from?" Query Builder This interface facilitates the simple navigation and filtering that enables queries to be provided in the form of online documentation or embedded in impact analysis templates. The query interface eliminates the need to write SQL to produce results. Meta Data Sharing and Reuse DataStage XE uses a "publish and subscribe" mechanism to distribute standard meta data from a variety of sources. Users can subscribe to meta data publications on a one-time or recurring basis.

When meta data changes, subscribers are automatically notified. For example, DataStage XE developers can use Publish and Subscribe to share and re-use DataStage XE components across multiple projects, thereby shortening the integration development cycle.

Meta Data Delivery

DataStage XE allows dynamic, batch-oriented and XSL-T customizable meta data delivery via reports and query results in XML or HTML format, complete with hyperlinks for easy end-user access and navigation. These are also automatically propagated to any Web Site or Portal. The DataStage XE meta data management component works to efficiently collect events that occur in the data integration environment while remote servers transparently report their operational results back to DataStage XE. From a single vantage point, managers can review jobs and proactively identify bottlenecks and errors in processing. The result: fewer resource conflicts and fewer hours wasted attempting to contact field personnel to research problems or perform status reporting. Business Users are now able to use familiar tools to query their business and technical meta data directly. Under direct Administrative control, the Administrator is able to instantiate the newly available Common Data Subject Area view model as a set of normalized relational tables within the same database schema as the MetaStage directory. This will enable business users to construct cross impact tool analysis and discover business definitions, names, descriptions, table definitions and cube measures directly from their target Data Warehouse, Source System Tables, Business Intelligence tools, OLAP Cubes and Entity/OO Modeling tools.

Tool Integrations
> Business Objects > DataStage > Embarcadero ER/Studio > CA AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler > Cognos Impromptu > ODBC > Oracle Designer > Sybase PowerDesigner > MicroStrategy > Hyperion Essbase Integration Server > Informatica > Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM)

Operating Systems
CLIENT > Windows NT Version 4.0 > Windows 2000 > Windows XP > Windows NT Version 4.0 > Windows 2000 > SUN Solaris > IBM AIX > Compaq Tru64 > HP-UX

Technical Specifications

SERVER

About Ascential Ascential Software Corporation offers the industrys only scalable enterprise integration solution that spans the entire data life cycle: data profiling, data quality management and cleansing, end-to-end meta data management and data extraction, transformation and loading. Ascentials Enterprise Integration Suite enables businesses to achieve the fastest time-to-value for their strategic enterprise applications, to have the highest confidence in the data they use to drive revenues and profits, and to continuously realize more value and ROI from their data assets and IT systems. Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., Ascential has offices worldwide and supports more than 2,100 customers in such industries as telecommunications, insurance, financial services, healthcare/life sciences, media/entertainment, manufacturing and retail. For more information on Ascential Software or a list of our international offices, visit our website at: www.ascentialsoftware.com.
50 Washington Street Westboro, MA 01581 Toll Free: 800.966.9875, Option 2 Tel. 508.366.3888 www.ascentialsoftware.com
DS-200229-0902

2002 Ascential Software Corporation. All rights reserved. The trademarks and service marks shown are trademarks of Ascential Software Corporation or its affiliates and may be pending or registered in the United States and other jurisdictions. Other marks are the property of the owners of those marks.

Printed in USA 09/02. All information is as of September 2002 and is subject to change.