IBM Information Management System (IMS)

IBM Information Management System is a management system for hierarchical databases with transaction opportunities^[1].

The IBM company works on this DBMS since 1968.

IMS is created with the assistance of IBM in cooperation with Rockwell and Caterpillar for the space program Apollo in 1966. The task of IMS included processing of the specification of a product for the Saturn-5 rocket and the ships Apollo.

On August 14, 1968 it is considered issue date of a system. A system was created as technology for IBM System/360 platform and later is postponed for more modern operating systems from IBM, including for z/OS.

Since the end of the 1990th a system supports access in the Java programming language, the JDBC interfaces, processing of XML, in the 2000th years support of web services is included.

The software constructed on IBM System z gives an ability to manage and distributions of data. It consists of two parts: manager of databases and transaction manager. Both provide the high processing speed, performance and reliability.

Possibilities of IMS IMS^[2]

• Quick access to critical data using powerful control functions by data and distributions of data.
• Reduction of terms of development and reduction of costs for application development thanks to the simplified interfaces and tools.
• Integration with other products from IBM for performance improvement and data management.

Quick access to crucial data

• Includes support of the 64-bit manager of the Fast Path buffer for elimination of "bottlenecks" and improvement of processing speed of transactions.
• Provides support of the expanded address volume (EAV) for reduction of restrictions for disk storage, providing big scalability.
• Offers full-function buffer pools of databases for reduction of a downtime of a system and improvement of availability.
• Provides extended commands of requests and updates for data availability improvement.
• Provides communication with Multiple Systems Coupling (MSC) TCP/IP for capacity growth and performance improvement.

Reduction of terms of development and reduction of costs for application development

• Provides the centralized data warehouse for dynamic determinations of resources, simplification of management, storage and sharing of resources.
• The IMS directory provides uniform storage for the data connected with the IMS databases for simplification of management of big production and test environments.
• IMS Connect, the integrated IMS function, improves communication under the TCP/IP protocol, provides access to IMS-applications and data via the Internet and supports XML-conversion. It is possible to create the client applications IMS Connect in the Java and C/C languages ++.

Integration with other products of IBM

• It is integrated with IBM Rational Developer for System z, providing the effective platform for the program of development and support of IMS-applications.
• It is integrated with the IBM WebSphere DataPower devices allowing to get access to IMS resources via the Internet.
• Provides multithreaded interaction between IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS and IMS for fall forward of request processing of clients of IMS Database Control (DBCTL).
• It is integrated with IBM InfoSphere IMS Replication for z/OS for increase in availability of IMS data and ensuring timeliness of distribution of information of the enterprise level.
• It is integrated with IBM InfoSphere Guardium Data Encryption for DB2 and IMS Databases for monitoring of activity of databases and protection of vulnerable data.

Notes