CodeFutures News & Industry Commentary Blog

CodeFutures has a real bias for clever technologies (anybody interested in a cool DAO generator?).

CodeFutures has recently worked with virtual databases, which is a very clever technology. Not a lot of Java developers know about virtual databases, but they solve a very common problem.

If you're building an enterpise application that relies on existing data in an organization, you're probably going to come across a wide variety of different storage formats (for example, there's still plenty of COBOL applications storing data in ISAM (Btree) files).

You could use a traditional ETL tool, EAI, data warehouse, or middleware to access this data, which can create yet more data sources to manage.

The virtual database approach is a more elegant solution - and a lot more convenient for Java developers.

A virtual database consists of a meta data dictionary that holds information about an organization's data sources. It knows about the type of data source, the format, and the location of the data.

So far, nothing very special. But there's some additional key points:

-A virtual database allows the real data to stay in situ and accessed in real-time. No data warehouse with data replication issues.

-For a Java developer, a vitual database looks and feels like a normal database. So the data can be accessed through JDBC.

So what could be a very tricky challenge integrating multiple data sources of different formats becomes a relatively easy task (if you're using a DAO generator, very trivial task).

The product that first alerted CodeFutures to the advantages of virtual database is produced by seeMore Technologies. The product is aimed at database administrators (there's an emphasis on usability and reproducing the look and feel of a traditional relational databae) and should not be too difficult for Java developers to master. It allows the creation of aliases for the tables, views, and columns held within the virtual database. Additional views can be created within the virtual database. seeMore also supports native database and Java stored procedures.

Because a virtual database looks like a real database, there was very little required to integrate the seeMore Virtual Database with FireStorm/DAO, apart from some testing.

So now we have a good answer when we're asked about create DAOs to access data from multiple sources.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software