IBM Beefs Up Data Studio - Software Development Times On The Web

IBM Beefs Up Data Studio
For-pay release targets developer tooling
By P. J. Connolly

January 15, 2008 — Data management is becoming a hot-button issue for many developers, with a growing concern over how data is handled and the emergence of regulatory schemes meant to provide standard controls on the use of data, whether inside the data center or outside. Perhaps the most important consideration, however, remains the scalability of an application in a world of ever-expanding datasets.

IBM took a step in that direction in December when it updated its IBM Data Studio, which was introduced in October at the company’s Information on Demand conference in Las Vegas. The initial release, a free download that supported IBM data servers, was described by Grant Hutchison, Data Studio product manager, as an extension of the Eclipse Data Tools Project, with extra capabilities designed specifically for IBM’s DB2 and Informix data servers.

But new this time around are IBM Data Studio Developer and a pureQuery runtime for IBM Data Studio, designed to provide developers with what Hutchison called a “highly optimized Java data access framework.” He later noted, “Data access becomes the key point when you start scaling up applications, and [many] frameworks don’t really address that.”

A Family Affair
IBM Data Studio will eventually be a family of products, he said, incorporating existing tools such as Rational Data Architect, and extending support to data servers from other companies.

“One of the aspects of pureQuery is to take the power of the SQL language and bring it into the Java programming environment in a way that makes it very easy for Java developers to use,” he explained. “When result sets are returned from this pureQuery-type SQL, the results become a collection of Java objects, so it’s very easy for a Java developer” to use.

“When it’s time to roll out these applications,” he continued, “there’s a deployment option that allows you to not just execute the application in a dynamic SQL way…we allow them to deploy into static SQL, a preoptimized access plan that’s supported across the DB2 family. That gives better application performance, better governance and an improved security model.

“Data Studio Developer extends the development environment for Java projects,” he claimed. “That could be done with Data Studio Developer on its own, and integrate that with whatever your Java IDE is, or you can install Data Studio Developer into the latest version of Rational Application Developer.” Using the static access plan in DB2, he noted, “gives you a much more resilient response time; it’s more predictable, because the queries are not being looked at every time they’re executed.”

The pureQuery runtime, he added, “gets deployed with your applications into your Java application servers, whether they’re WebSphere or another application server.”

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