Sybase Inc has licensed mainframe database application management specialist BMC Software Inc’s change capture technology to develop Replication Agents for IMS, VSAM and DB2 which will beta test in the third quarter and ship by the year-end. The BMC technology will be used to capture IMS, VSAM, and DB2 transaction data. The transactions are logged to a database-independent logging system in MVS. Sybase’s Replication application programming interface for MVS reads the persistent transactions in real time and converts that information into a format that Replication Server can interpret. Sybase says the combined functionality defines the Replication Agent which then transmits the transaction information to Replication Server for delivery to all sites. Replicate sites can subscribe all changes to a given DB2 table, IMS segment or VSAM record type or just a subset of the changes. The idea is that companies can replicate transactions from IMS and VSAM sources directly to a client-server target without an intermediate staging table in DB2/MVS. Sybase claims the process is transparent and asynchronous to the IMS, VSAM and DB2 mainframe applications that are operating on the data. The Replication Agent products will support both Advanced Point-to-Point Communications (LU 6.2) and TCP/IP communication protocols from the mainframe to the local network environment.
