Fundamentals

This chapter describes the current architecture and development policy for the DbtuTools project. It represents guidelines for the development. If there is a need for changing these rules, the issue will be discussed and incorporated.

General architecture

As the mission statement says, the project is working hard to become an integrated solution for working with the UNIX / Wintel versions of IBM's DB2 UDB database family. It consists of an increasing number of independent (and in some cases loosely coupled) tools. These tools sit on top of a framework, which provides a common infrastructure (directory trees, libraries, common services etc).

Design objectives

Building a multi-component solution, it is important to have a common understanding of the design objectives to ensure a consistent architecture:

• Robustness is absolutely essential!
• KISS (Keep it simple, stupid)
• Strong framework! As much intelligence as possible should be provided by the framework. In a best-case scenario, the tools act as a caller only (given the fact that it makes sense).
• Command line tools first! For automation and integration this variant is the best. An optional GUI can be easily built on top.

Programming languages

Dealing with the different needs within the project, we make use of more than one programming language. Nevertheless we are focusing on as few programming languages as possible and sensible.

• Java is the primary programming language of the project. It is (mostly) platform independent, commonly known and used, has a rich set of standard libraries and its runtime is already installed on a lot of systems (being required for other products too). So it's the first choice for coding within the project.
  The minimum Java version is 1.2, so please ensure your coding doesn't require features coming with a successor version.
• C is used for the communication with the API's provided by the database system. Some of them - for example the snapshot monitor - cannot be directly accessed with Java. This is where we use C as a wrapper.
• Shell Script / Windows Batch is used for issues where it is needed to manipulate the current environment (like environment variables etc). The second issue is to use them as a wrapper for calling the tools written in Java.
  For Shell Scripts, we use the Korn Shell, because it is installed on all the systems (being a requirement of DB2).

Roadmap

Niels Bohr once said "Prediction is difficult, especially the future". The same is true when it comes to the versioning/roadmap of a product. So I will try to focus on the next steps only.
The first versions of the DbtuTools project started with a number of small tools written in C and Shell Script. They were independent from each from other and there was no need for a common infrastructure. Then Java came into the game and the first tools made use of the Java packages coming with this tool collection. So we started to establish a common infrastructure providing a directory structure [more] and common libraries.
Now we are focusing on providing some common services (Config-Reader, Tempfile-Object,...) to prepare for the development of the 3 core processes within a database life:

• The userexit. Providing a robust and advanced version is the next major milestone.
  (currently expected to be released in Q1'03)
• Backup and Recovery.
• Reorg / Runstats / Rebind.

Once these core processes are done, the project will have reached version 1.0 - do not compare this to 1.0 versions of commercial products, within the open source community, version 1.0 (normally) means a robust and well-proven product. Nobody can foresee the next major issues after version 1.0, but be sure, that there will be a lot of additional nice tools out there - even before reaching version 1.0.