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Success Story

2014: GDIS AND BOI

25 years of success and confidence.
SUMMARY

Generali Deutschland Informatik Services GmbH – previously known as Aachener und Münchener Informatik Service AG – has been a loyal client of BOI since May 1992. TABEX has been used productively in the company ever since.

GDIS is now assuming IT tasks for the Generali Deutschland Group and for subsidiaries of Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A. Within the Generali Deutschland Group, GDIS acts as a single IT service provider for the entire Group. Its core competences are in the stable and viable operation of a multi-platform infrastructure and in the development of powerful, future-proof IT applications.

A key advantage of TABEX over other table management systems was the high performance of the table access. From TABEX/2 onwards, high-performance data access has been an important feature of all TABEX products.

400 TABEX tables are loaded from DB2 into the Common Data Space.

Generali Group Austria: Composite insurer with additional financial services; part of the Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A. in Trieste, Italy.

  • Employees: 4.811 (2012)
  • Total assets: 14,99 Mrd. EUR (2012)
  • Third largest insurance company in Austria with 15% market share
  • 999 Billion data transactions per year
Using this technology confers a major edge on BOI Customers

GDIS | Common Data Space Technologie in TABEX

The Success Story

Challenges

In the early 90s, the car application „K-Neu“ was developed by the Aachener und Münchener Informatik-Service AG. The architecture of this application was based on complex processes, which could not be implemented in DB2 due to insufficient performance.

Therefore, a table management system enabling high-performance access to tables was sought. TABEX was chosen because it best met the requirements of the Aachener und Münchener Informatik Service AG.

Goals

  • That it can be used under TSO, CICS, IMS / DC and batch conditions
  • Easy maintenance of the tables by the technical departments of the Group subsidiaries
  • Validity constraints on the tables determined by date
  • That access restrictions be applied in the broadest sense; wherever possible RACF compatible
  • Compatibility with DB2, both in data maintenance and database access
  • Easy maintenance and development of the system
  • Where possible, compatibility with in-house approval processes

Solution

With the introduction of the Common Data Space Architecture by IBM, the use of data spaces in addition to the address space was made possible. TABEX was thus extended, so that it can load tables in the Common Data Space. Thus, the performance has been significantly enhanced by the use of access to the same datapool loaded in memory
tables from all regions.

TABEX has taken advantage of the possibility that after the introduction of 31-bit addressing up to 2GB of virtual data spaces can be used
additionally to the address spaces.

Common Data Space Technology allows the central storage of data in the main memory; it also allows access to these centrally loaded data. This procedure was implemented also in operating systems such as
Linux, Unix, Solaris, or Windows.

This technology guarantees that only one copy of a table is used in all applications. In addition, no database access is necessary. Thus, data can be accessed efficiently and without additional memory consumption.

Benefit

Use of Common Data Space technology in TABEX offers a wide range of advantages:

  • Read access with high-performance calls
  • Loading or reorganizing data spaces can be performed without affecting running applications (uninterrupted switching between load data space and work space, following data change or reorganization)
  • No synchronization is required
  • Access to the correct path via the access module in the STEPLIB concatenation
  • Data spaces depending on a DB/DC environment
  • Separate data spaces for the various integrated subsidiaries (client capability) analogous to IMS and DB2. To maintain client separation, different search paths and project IDs are used.
  • Several Common Data Space data spaces can be active in parallel and filled with different tables. Via application-specific paths and project identifiers, the order of searches, such as clients, different environments, etc. can be controlled.
  • By addressing each table by name, date and file ID, the IT organization and versioning can be mapped. With the additional project identifier, different instances or test levels are possible. This ensures that only the correct version of the tables is accessible.
  • A special data space can be used to buffer data that must not be affected by a rollback. This is used, for example to save insurance contract numbers, so that in case of a crash of the application the system can rewind the process. In this case it is important that this contract number is not lost through a rollback (this would be the case
    with DB2 storage) or that the performance of the application is decreased because of too many I/Os (when writing the contract numbers in a file).
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The biggest advantage of Common Data Space Technology for Generali Deutschland is the high performance of accesses: According to measurements, the memory accesses using Common Data Space technology are up to 20 times faster than DB2.

GDIS | Vorteile Common Data Space Technologie

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