Abstract: Access to data stored in a database within a data processing system is provided to an application in the following manner. At least one criterion for providing data is determined based at least on a service level agreement. A provisioning and deployment description identifying at least data units of a database to be provided to the application is received, and a system description including status and resource usage information of possible target systems within the data processing system is maintained. A placement technology description describing properties of data placement technologies is received. At least one target system and at least one data placement technology are selected based on said at least one criterion and said descriptions. Access to said data units is provided for said application using said selected at least one target database system and said at least one data placement technology.

Abstract: An apparatus, system, and method are disclosed for automatically generating an Information Management System (IMS) hierarchical database description from an arbitrary Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema. The apparatus, system, and method may include the steps of: parsing an XML schema including a single root element; generating an XML schema tree that corresponds to the XML schema; generating an IMS segment tree such that each XML schema node is represented by a corresponding IMS segment node; reducing the number of IMS segment nodes from the IMS segment tree based on reduction rules, such that the IMS segment tree corresponds to IMS hierarchical database constraints; and generating IMS database description corresponding to the reduced IMS segment tree.