IBM Data Gate: Making On-Premises Mainframe Databases Available to Cloud Applications

Abstract

Many companies use databases on the mainframe for their mission critical applications. They will continue to do so in the future. It is important to exploit this existing data for analysis and business decisions via modern applications that are often built for cloud environments. IBM Db2 for z/OS Data Gate (Data Gate) is bridging the gap between mainframe databases and such cloud-native applications. It offers high-performance data synchronization connecting both worlds, while providing data coherence at the level of individual transactions.Data Gate is a hybrid cloud solution, which protects existing systems and applications (and investments into those) while enabling new use cases to work with and analyze mainframe data. It evolved from the IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) technology by adjusting the architecture and some of the functionality. In this paper, we give an overview of Data Gate and how it addresses typical ETL issues like code page conversions, data coherence, encryption or integration with other cloud services. We also describe how Data Gate can be used to handle query acceleration or archiving of cold data -just like IDAA did. Along the lines, we highlight key differences between the two products.