Datasheet

Ascential Software

DataStage®
The solution to enterprise data integration
The most sources. The most targets. All built on the most scalable and
robust architecture available.

DataStage delivers three core capabilities necessary

Your company's profitability hinges on its ability to act swiftly and
make sound business decisions, based on a complete and accurate
single view of your customers, suppliers, and operations.
Unfortunately, the critical information required to gain this 360°
view and make these key decisions is scattered throughout the enter-
prise, across multiple applications, departments and divisions. And
while each source system contains pieces to the 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
<DataStage>
for success in enterprise data integration: the most
comprehensive sources and targets, to easily and
quickly connect to any source or target system;
advanced maintenance and development, which
simplifies administration and speeds implementation,
and the most scalable platform available, to han-
dle today's massive volumes of new corporate data
through high-performance processing.
The Ascential Enterprise Integration
Suite transforms your corporate data

there is harder to see. That's why so many organizations like yours into "Intelligent Information" - informa-
tion that is reliable, relevant and com-
are still struggling to get the desired ROI from their strategic busi-
plete - so you can maximize your IT
ness applications. Each system calls for data in different formats investments and make the best busi-
and each system defines its data differently. There’s no way to ness decisions possible, based on the
assess the ripple affect of changes to data at the source or to com- most accurate, current information
available.
municate changes to downstream information users. Data volumes
are growing exponentially, and you need to access and process data That's because it's the only integrated
in both real-time and shorter batch windows. It's confusion on a solution to deliver on the vision of
mammoth scale -- and it's preventing your company from getting the real-time enterprise. Our service-
oriented architecture is part of a plat-
what it needs for a competitive advantage.
form of services that includes parallel
processing, end-to-end meta data man-
Until Now.
agement, and complete connectivity to
support real-time data profiling, quality
and transformation with inherent Native
Introducing DataStage® Language Support. The result is on-
demand data integration - from any
DataStage, a core component of Ascential's Enterprise Integration Suite, source, anywhere, at anytime - regard-
enables you to tightly integrate enterprise information, regardless of the less of the data volumes or complexity.
sources, targets and time frames. Whether you're building an enterprise
data warehouse to support the information needs of the entire company,
building a "real-time" data warehouse, or integrating dozens of source sys-
tems to support enterprise applications like CRM, SCM, and ERP,
DataStage helps ensure the success of your enterprise data integration
initiatives.

The Industry’s Most Powerful Solution
DataStage supports the collection, integration and transformation
of high volumes of data, with data structures ranging from simple
to highly complex. DataStage manages data arriving within sec-
onds of being acquired, as well as massive quantities of data that
flood the system, in daily, weekly or monthly processing intervals.
The Most Comprehensive Source and
Target Support
DataStage supports a virtually unlimited number of heterogeneous
data sources and targets in a single job, including:
> text files
> complex data structures in XML
> ERP systems such as SAP and PeopleSoft
> almost any database - including partitioned databases -
such as Oracle, DB2 EE/EEE/ESE (with and without DPF),
Informix, Sybase, Teradata, SQL Server, and the list goes
on including access using ODBC
> web services
> SAS
> Messaging and EAI including WebSphereMQ and
SeeBeyond
…and many more. If it's in your enterprise, it's supported.
Real Time Data Integration Support
DataStage can operate in real-time, capturing messages or extract-
ing data at a moment's notice on the same platform that also inte-
grates bulk data. This provides a key advantage over competing
offerings that require the use of two separate tools to achieve the
same functionality.
Advanced Maintenance and Development
DataStage 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 reduce learning
curves, simplify administration, and optimize the use of develop-
Figure 1: DataStage is the solution
of choice for complex data
integration challenges.
ment resources resulting in a decreased development and mainte-
nance cycle for data integration applications. As a result,
DataStage enables companies to spend less time developing their
integration and more time reaping the benefits of it.
Complete Development Environment
The DataStage design metaphor is characterized best by the
phrase "work as you think." Developers use a data-flow model of
application programming and execution, which allows them to cre-
ate a visual sequential data flow. A robust graphical palette helps
developers diagram the flow of data through their environment via
GUI driven drag-and-drop design. Developers also benefit from a
versatile scripting language, powerful debugging capabilities, and
an open application programming interface (API) for leveraging
external code.
Get Started Quickly
Intelligent Assistants are wizard-like functionality within DataStage
that used for initial job creation. Creating Slowly Changing
Dimension jobs (supporting Types 1, 2, and 3) is one example of
Intelligent Assistants available. Job templates and pre-configured
components also speed development.
Powerful Pre-built Functions
DataStage features the industry's most extensive data integration
development environment, with a library of more than 400 pre-built
functions and routines that allows developers to simply pick and
choose.
Reuse, Versioning and Sharing
DataStage shortens the development
cycle by promoting the reuse of exist- DataStage's end-to-end meta data
ing data integration business logic. This
works through the concept of contain- sharing among all the tools that
ers, which allow jobs and meta data make up the data integration life
created in one container to be shared
and reused by other jobs. Versioning
cycle ensures that all relevant
extends the development, test and meta data is connected for a
deployment of jobs among multiple
clear, unambiguous picture of
developers or DataStage servers.
your business.
DataStage®
Figure 2: DataStage Transformer
Event-based Scheduling and Monitoring
Administrators can schedule any DataStage job using its built-in,
calendar-based graphical or command-line scheduling capability.
Alternatively, DataStage can be managed directly using any enter-
prise-class scheduling tool. Detailed job execution information for
problem determination, tuning, and monitoring is available via a
GUI, text and XML for incorporation with your existing operational
infrastructure.
The Most Scalable Platform Available
DataStage enables companies to solve large-scale business prob-
lems through high-performance processing of massive data vol-
umes. By leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of multi-
processor hardware platforms, DataStage Enterprise Edition can
scale to satisfy the demands of ever growing data volumes and
ever shrinking batch windows.
DataStage 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 parallel-a costly process that
often requires the expertise of specialists. Development is done
using sequential logic and the deployment configuration automati-
cally adds the desired degree of parallelism.
Open Extensible Environment
DataStage Enterprise Edition is a robust, open environment that not
only supports Ascential integration products like Ascential
ProfileStage™ and Ascential QualityStage™, but third-party appli-
cations like SAS, as well. In addition, DataStage supports custom,
homegrown code, enabling companies to reuse their existing pro-
prietary code and execute it in parallel against unlimited data volumes.
Flexible Parallelism
A separate configuration file allows users to define the degree of
parallelism without changes to application code. As a result, should
the business need to boost the frequency of its integration, users
could take the application from 2-way in the morning, to 32-way in
the afternoon, to 128-way at night-all with only a simple change to
the configuration file.
The Secret: Partitioning and Dynamic Re-partitioning
Ascential's parallel technology operates by a divide-and-conquer
technique, splitting the largest integration jobs into subsets ("parti-
tion parallelism") and flowing these subsets concurrently across all
available processors ("pipeline parallelism"). This combination of
pipeline and partition parallelism delivers true linear scalability
(defined as an increase in performance proportional to the number
of processors) and makes hardware the only mitigating factor to
performance. However, downstream processes may need data par-
titioned differently. Consider a transformation that is based on cus-
tomer last name, but the enriching needs to occur on zip code - for
house-holding purposes - with loading into the warehouse based
on customer credit card number (more on parallel database inter-
faces below). With dynamic data re-partitioning, data is re-parti-
tioned on-the-fly between processes - without landing the data to
disk - based on the downstream process data partitioning needs.
Wide-Ranging Parallel Hardware Support
DataStage scales effortlessly from SMP and SMP clusters to MPP
servers with hundreds of processors. Ensures critical integration
“
applications will scale in pace with business.
Much of the significance of the capabilities provided by
DataStage Enterprise Edition is due to the ease with
which pre-existing serial applications are transformed to
operate in parallel. Without the DataStage Enterprise
”
Edition, dealing with the complexity of setting up and
managing parallel processes would be formidable.
RICHARD WINTER, President, Winter Group
Figure 3: Data Re-partitioning
 DataStage®

Figure 4: Putting It All Together: Data Flow,

Automatic Partitioning and Re-partitioning,
Scalable Hardware

Products
DataStage
DataStage is the industry-leading data integration and transformation
product that provides advanced development and maintenance
capabilities for unsurpassed levels of productivity.

DataStage Extended Edition

DataStage Extended Edition builds upon DataStage by incorporating
Ascential MetaStage® meta data management solution for a clear,
unambiguous definition and history of your data, and . the Web
Services Client PACK, which enables DataStage designers to lever-
age web services-based resources to enrich their job design, or as
source and target information remotely. Messages adaptors such as
IBM's WebSphere MQ, are also included with DataStage Extended
Edition.

DataStage Enterprise Edition

National Language Support:
DataStage Enterprise Edition takes performance to a new level.
DataStage is National Language Support (NLS) enabled using
Parallel processing capabilities, including partitioning, dynamic re-
Unicode.
partitioning, parallel database interfaces, and exploitation of scalable
hardware environments allows you to handle the massive volume,
Ascential also provides DataStage Enterprise Edition MVS, which
velocity and variety of data flowing into your organization. Together
natively executes on the mainframe. For more information on any
with end-to-end meta data management, advanced maintenance
Ascential product or service, please visit our web site at:
and development, and the ability to operate in real-time, DataStage
www.ascential.com. Or call us at: 1-800-966-9875.
Enterprise Edition provides the most powerful data integration and
transformation solution available.

DataStage DataStage Extended Edition DataStage Enterprise Edition

Platforms Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003
Server 2003 Server 2003 (coming soon)
IBM AIX IBM AIX IBM AIX
Technical HP Compaq Tru64 HP Compaq Tru64 HP Compaq Tru64
Specifications HP HP-UX HP HP-UX HP HP-UX
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
Sun Solaris Sun Solaris Sun Solaris

MetaStage Available Included Included

Web Services Client PACK Available Included Included
Message Adapters Available Included Included

About Ascential Ascential Software Corporation is the leading provider of enterprise data integration solutions to the Global 2000 and
government agencies. Customers use the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite and products to turn vast amounts of disparate, unrefined data into
reusable information that drives business success. Ascential Software's unique, comprehensive data integration suite enables customers to easily
collect, validate, organize, administer and deliver information to realize more value from their enterprise data, reduce costs and increase profitability.
Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., Ascential Software has offices worldwide and supports more than 2,200 customers in such industries as finan-
cial services, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods and retail. More information on Ascential Software can
be found on the Web at www.ascential.com.

50 Washington Street
Westboro, MA 01581
Toll Free: 800.966.9875, Option 2 © 2003 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
Tel. 508.366.3888 property of the owners of those marks.
www.ascential.com

DS-300313-0603 Printed in USA 06/03. All information is as of June 2003 and is subject to change.