Product features and advantages
Applications with high transaction rates demand fast transaction throughput and typically have voluminous storage requirements.
Many of the world’s most business-critical applications use IMS Fast Path to take advantage of the transaction rate, large storage capabilities, and speed characteristics of data entry databases (DEDBs). However, these business-critical applications also need to remain online while structural changes are made to the database.
BMC created the Fast Path Online Restructure/EP product to meet the growing customer demand for 24x7 data availability. Fast Path Online Restructure/EP can efficiently make structural changes to a DEDB without taking the areas offline.
Fast Path Online Restructure/EP allows the areas to remain online through the use of shadow databases. The shadow databases receive a copy of the restructured data; the product captures and applies changes to that data as they occur in the online systems. When the appropriate areas have been restructured and all changes have been applied, a short outage occurs while the original areas and the newly restructured areas are swapped.
Fast Path Online Restructure/EP creates an environment that encourages you to exploit the advantages of DEDBs without the downtime associated with traditional batch maintenance processes. You can perform the following structural changes while the database is online to IMS:
- Add and remove areas
- Resize areas
- Perform randomizer changes
- Add segments at the end of a hierarchical path
- Add a sequential dependent segment (SDEP)
- Add, change, or remove a compression exit
- Modify lengths of variable-length segments (decrease the minimum length or increase the maximum length)
- Modify segment content