Introduction to IBM Information Server FastTrack

IBM Information Server FastTrack is a tool that belongs to the Infosphere products family and is designed specifically for business and technical analysts, data modelers and developers. It provides a set of quick and straightforward interfaces to rapidly develop data integration (ETL) projects providing the features of an automatic translation of business requirements. FastTrack bridges the gap between the business and the technical user.

The crucial features of Infosphere Fasttrack are: centralized location for specifications, Excel importing and exporting interfaces, DataStage job generation with business rule annotations, automatic data model and business term generation, discovery algorithms to map source to target and support for DataStage Enterprise Edition to further enhance the processing by professional Datastage developers.

IBM Information Server FastTrack is fully integrated into the IBM Information Server platform so that the specifications, metadata and the ETL jobs are shared accross various tools such as Information Analyzer, DataStage Server and Business Glossary.

Fasttrack components

The Fasttrack application components and objects are as follows:

  • Projects - its goal is to group specifications into logical folders. Typically, there is one project per application. A project is a centralized location to manage specifications and to track the statuses (review, in progress, deployed for instance)
  • Specifications - can be created in Fasttrack using drag & drop, with auto-map wizards or by importing specifications stored in a ms excel spreadsheet. Business specifications are stored in the Metadata Server central repository
  • Datastage jobs are generated automatically within FastTrack within a given Datastage folder. Jobs generated by FastTrack include shared containers, look-up stages, transformations, annotations and are pretty clear and easy to understand. Data lineage is tracked from specification to the deployed job and jobs are automatically documented with specification requirements. The process of datastage jobs creation is aligned with the Information Server security and user roles.
  • Reporting module for specification documentation, implementation details, statistics and status summary.


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