A new article has been published on the rather spiffy InfoSphere Change Data Capture technology:

IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) uses InfoSphere Change Data Capture (InfoSphere CDC) to provide support for heterogeneous data replication. Heterogeneous replication means that you can replicate data between IDS servers and other types of database servers—even database servers from other vendors. This article shows you how to configure InfoSphere CDC for IDS to enable heterogeneous replication.

InfoSphere CDC Version 6.3 for Informix captures and delivers changed data across diverse data stores in real time. Figure 1 shows some of the applications this functionality can have in data warehousing, real time analytics, business intelligence and reporting, and eBusiness. InfoSphere CDC also provides functions for data translation, filtering, replication, and high availability. (InfoSphere CDC is based on technology previously found in DataMirror Transformation Server.)

Informix Dynamic Server provides a Change Data Capture API that external clients can use to capture high level online transactional data from the logical logs of an IDS server. The API provides functions to create and end a transaction capture session and to initiate and end capture on a given table for a given capture session. It also provides functions for other administrative tasks. The syscdc system database in IDS contains the change data capture functions and system tables.

The IDS Change Data Capture API is a public API that is available to any user. The IDS Change Data Capture API Programmer’s Guide contains a Change Data Capture sample program (cdcapi.ec). Currently, the IDS CDC API supports capturing transactional data from current logs but not from archived logical logs.

This sounds like it could be very interesting indeed!