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Diving Deeply Into Databases


Altova’s 2008 products emphasis database connectivity

By David Worthington
October 3, 2007 — 
If a trading partner sends another partner an XML file, the safe money is that it is not formatted to fit a particular table in that partner's database, and neither is that XML feed of calendar information that the marketing department subscribes to.

Scenarios such as these motivated Altova to broaden the database functionality of its 2008 product line, said Tim Hale, Altova’s director of global marketing.

The 2008 versions of Altova DatabaseSpy, MapForce, StyleVision and XMLSpy have new capabilities to connect to relational databases, and edit, query and view relational data and XML data stored within. The products were released in mid-September.

DatabaseSpy 2008 provides a unified interface, query and design tool for multiple databases from major vendors, including those from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. It can now create and edit database views—stored queries of data from database tables—as well as stored procedures, with the goal of optimizing repetitive SQL statements.

Altova also added database content editing functionality to DatabaseSpy, designed to enable users to edit and retrieve content in existing database tables, add rows to insert new data or delete rows through a point-and-click paradigm. Changes are not applied against production databases until the user reviews them and commits to the change.

When a calendar RSS feed has field values that differ from a database input field, data conversion is necessary. MapForce 2008 adds a value map function that transforms field values from the source to the target, said Hale, making it possible, for example, to swap numbers for the names of the months that represent them.

MapForce is a data mapping, conversion and integration tool that maps database, EDI, flat file, Web services and XML data to generate integration applications for recurrent conversions. The new version has more options for customizing XML output generated when mapping data to an XML file, and aggregate data processing functions.

A database connection wizard and Altova’s database query window was added to Altova’s StyleVision stylesheet designer. New features also make it possible to reuse portions of existing design files when creating new designs.

Altova’s flagship XMLSpy product now offers extended support for Microsoft’s Office Open XML document file formats. Users can edit, extract, query and transform data that is stored in Microsoft Office application files.

There’s not much one can do with data locked away in proprietary formats, except e-mail it around, said Hale, who continued, “You can now write applications to extract, transform and use that data programmatically. That’s huge. Once people realize that they have data that is somewhat standards-based, they can do a lot more with it than they have been able to do in the past.”

Additionally, XMLSpy now allows SQL data editing from within its database query window. Hale said this creates a more seamless experience, where users do not have to drop out of one tool and come back to it later.

Source Code and Schemas
Integration is the watchword for Altova’s 2008 product line. The UModel UML modeling environment now integrates with Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, with added support for Visual Basic .NET code engineering. UModel is synchronized with the source code editors of both IDEs for real time visualization of applications revisions.

Hale noted that SchemaAgent, once a value-add to Altova’s MissionKit suite, is coming into its own as a standalone product with this release. Originally intended to analyze relationships between XML schemas, SchemaAgent now visualizes and manages Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations and Web Services Description Language file relationships.

SchemaAgent also includes change impact analysis capabilities. “It’s good to know in advance if documents would become invalid [when schemas are modified],” said Hale.

Finally, DiffDog 2008 now features one-click directory merge and binary file comparison, while SemanticWorks 2008 allows developers to edit instances of classes when designing Semantic Web documents, ontologies and vocabularies.


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