Optim for Legacy (Non-Relational) Application Retirement Middleware Options

by Matthew Simons, ILMG Practice Lead

When you’re helping your customer archive or retire data from mainframe data sources, you’ll need to make some informed choices during the sales process to determine which mix of products will address their needs properly.  This isn’t always as straightforward as it seems, especially when Optim and the Mainframe are involved.

 

When accessing non-relational data on a z/OS platform using Optim Distributed (LUW), you must use a middleware layer on the mainframe to present this "legacy" (VSAM, IMS, SEQ) and non-relational (CA IDMS, CA Datacom) data as a relational data source.  This relational translation is what can be linked to natively supported Optim DBMSs (Oracle and DB2 LUW are the most common).  

 

When selling and implementing Optim, there are two options for this middleware component of the solution:

Things You Need to Build Your Own STAP with mongoTap as an Example

by John Haldeman, Security Practice Lead

Late last year Joe DiPietro and his colleagues at IBM wrote two articles providing a detailed explanation of Guardium's Universal Feed (a link to those articles are found later in this post). The Universal Feed allows you to build your own STAPs for data sources that Guardium does not support. I recently built and open sourced a STAP for mongoDB. I want to use this post to talk about some things that you will need in order to build a custom STAP (other than the knowledge of the protocol explained in the Universal Feed articles). I will use the mongoTap as an example for the discussion.