During our oracle Training introduction session at Payilagam, Our oracle Trainer was explaining the types of databases. He told the students about Hierarchical, Network and relational databases .Oracle comes under relational database. He provided example for each database type, namely IMS for Hierarchical, IDMS for Network and Oracle for relational. One of our students has asked a question “what is IMS and how it works”.
As we have an expert taking IMS training for our Mainframe training students, I thought that our Mainframe trainer can explain this elaborately. So we have asked our Mainframe Trainer to brief about IMS to our oracle batch students. I thought sharing that information here will be useful.
“IMS is Information Management System. When first space craft for Moon was developed during 1965-66, there were huge amount of bills and information. Storing this information in the conventional file system was an overhead. So there was a need for new database system that provides data integrity, avoids data redundancy and provides faster access to data. Hence IBM, Rockwell and caterpillar joined together and developed Information control system. Later name was changes to Information Management System (IMS).
IMS has both online transaction Management system and Database management system. Transaction Manager is called IMS Data Communication (IMS DC). Database Management is called IMS DB. Data is stored in IMS DB in hierarchical structure. That is, we have parent child relationship between the data records. We will have one root record. Under the root record, there will be child records. Records are called as segments. Child segment data can be retrieved by specifying the required path (path from root to that child) in the hierarchical structure. We have something called Data Language Interface (DLI). DLI acts as an interface between application program and database. DLI helps the application program to retrieve the data record from the database. Latest version of IMS is version 13. This version provides high performance online processing”.
After this explanation, some of our students proudly said, “along with oracle, we got some information about IMS in our training session today”. I was really happy to hear that.