WorkSpace Data Federation

WorkSpace Data Federation provides tools for several purposes: building and deploying data services to combine and transform relational data; defining sources of data to be used in data services; validating and enforcing schemas; and managing the data catalog.

WorkSpace Data Federation’s predefined operators let you create data services that perform relational operations like select, join, aggregate, group by, and order by, as well as advanced operations, including:

• Iterate, which can perform a computation for each input in a specified range
• Update, which can insert data into a relational database
• Generate, which can create new result sets

You can define custom operators to provide any further functionality you need.

In addition to tools for building data services, WorkSpace Data Federation provides tools for working with metadata models. A metadata model represents the schemas (columns and data types) of one or more database tables. You can use a metadata model to enforce a schema—a view model derived from a particular metadata model will share the metadata model’s schema, and WorkSpace Data Federation will alert you if the schemas diverge. You can be sure that any data service deployed from such a view model will conform to the original schema.

Metadata models also let you create Data Federation objects like data services that match database tables not only in schema but in name, so you can easily access the Data Federation objects using the same applications you now use to access database tables.

The Data Federation component of the Data Integration Suite provides a wider set of features that overlap with those of WorkSpace Data Federation.

• View Models
  A Data Federation view model is the abstract, graphical representation of the processing performed for a particular integration task. A view model can be deployed as one or more data services.
• Metadata Models
  In Sybase Data Federation, a metadata model expresses a schema. Each metadata model defines a set of tables; each table contains a set of named columns and each column is associated with a data type.
• The Data Federation Workspace
  The workspace is the directory in which WorkSpace Data Federation stores the files associated with your projects. In the workspace directory, Data Federation creates a subdirectory for each project.
• The Data Federation Perspective
  The Data Federation perspective in Sybase WorkSpace provides a set of editors and tools for developing Data Federation view models and metadata models and for managing a data catalog.

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