How do I setup DB2 Express-C Data Federation for a Sybase data source?

Question

I wish to make fields in a remote public Sybase database outlined at http://www.informatics.jax.org/software.shtml#sql appear locally in our DB2 project's schema. To do this, I was going to use data federation, however I can't seem to be able to install the data source library (Sybase-specific file libdb2ctlib.so for Linux) because only DB2 and Infomatix work OOTB with DB2 Express-C v9.5 (which is the version we're currently running, I also tried the latest V9.7.)

From unclear IBM documentation and forum posts, the best I can gather is we need to spend $675 on http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/federation-server/ to get support for Sybase but budget-wise that's a bit out of the question.

So is there a free method using previous tool versions (as it seems DB2 Information Integrator was rebranded as InfoSphere Federation Server) to setup DB2 data wrappers for Sybase? Alternatively, is there another non-MySQL approach we can use, such as switching our local DBMS from DB2 to PostgreSQL? Does the latter support data integration/federation?

Answer 1

DB2 Express-C does not allow federated links to any remote database, not even other DB2 databases. You are correct that InfoSphere Federation Server is required to federate DB2 to a Sybase data source. I don't know if PostgreSQL supports federated links to Sybase.

Answer 2

Derek, there are several ways in which one can create a federated database. One is by using the federated database capability that is built in to DB2 Express-C. However, DB2 Express-C can only federate data from specific data sources i.e. other DB2 databases and industry standard web services. To add Sybase to this list you must purchase IBM Federation Server product. The other way is to leverage DB2 capability to create User Defined Functions in DB2 Express-C that use OLE DB API to access other data sources. Because OLE DB is a Windows-based technology, only DB2 servers running on Windows can do that. What you do is create a table UDF that you can then use anywhere you would expect to see a table result set e.g view definition. For example, you could define a view that uses your UDF to materialize the results. These results would come from a query (via OLE DB) of your Sybase data (or any other OLE DB compliant data source). You can find more information here http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idm/v2r2/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.datatools.routines.doc/topics/coledb_cont.html