On July 7, 2009 IBM will be offering a no-charge teleconference titled "Misconceptions and Old Wives Tales on DB2 Database Maintenance and Recovery" . This 60 minute teleconference is scheduled to start at 11:00 AM EDT, 3:00 PM UTC and will discuss some of the myths around successfully maintaining your DB2 for z/OS environment. Registration for th

 Hello, long time reader, first time blogger here.  I work as a tech lead managing the advancement of heterogeneous database support for Optim Development Studio and Optim Database Administrator product offerings.   

Pleasantries out the way, I am here to tell you about the new ways of packaging our no-charge capabilities that we hope you’ll like.  We’re calling this is no-charge capability Data Studio and are using the Optim name for the is value-added capability. The goal is that this naming convention  should be less confusing and simpler.  You can get your basic admin and development tooling with Data Studio, and then add additional functionality if  needed by acquiring other Optim products (or Rational or InfoSphere etc...). You can try some of these additional capabilities by downloading and using the trials.

Data Studio comes in two flavors:

• The first being the standard Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which is the way most of the Optim offerings are released.  
• The second is what we call stand-alone.  This is built as an Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) package.
  

The stand-alone package is the one I will focus on in this blog. Eclipse RCP in simplistic terms refers to the absolute minimum set of plug-ins required to create an Eclipse-based Rich Client Application.  One of the primary goals for the Data Studio (RCP) stand-alone package was to provide a lightweight executable that would help DB2 and Informix DBAs perform day-day simple admin tasks.  So, all references to JDT (Java Development Tools) do not exist which also helps in keeping the stand-alone image lightweight.  

The stand-alone package is only 196 MB (network download size) and available on 32/64 bit platforms for Windows XP/Vista and Linux RedHat/SUSE which you can download here.  The installation process itself is trivial.  It’s a self-extracting binary that lays out the files in appropriate directories.  You will notice that the installer creates a default workspace for you in $HOME/IBM/Data Studio 2.2 stand-alone directory.  You can change that at a later time.  Since the stand-alone version is completely self-contained, a JRE v1.6 (Java runtime) is also bundled and installed with the product. The built-in help and welcome experience provide appropriate context-sensitive help and tutorials.

As depicted in the table below, the stand-alone version is rich with features that enable DBAs perform their day-day tasks effectively.  The main difference between the two packages is that the IDE package also has support for Java stored procedures, Web Services, SQLJ development and XML because it targets developers as well.


Default perspectives are also different. For the stand-alone, you will be presented with Database Administration; for the IDE, the default is the Data Perspective. Both packages support Data Development Project creation, with the IDE flavor able to create/debug Java stored procedures (in addition to SQL stored procedures, supported by both.)

A key highlight of both no-charge offerings is to let you know when another offering can help you perform a task.  The IDE version is installed via IBM Installation Manager (IM) and by definition can shell share with other Eclipse-based products such as Optim, Rational and InfoSphere.With the stand-alone package, if you want to shell-share with another product, you will need to switch to the Data Studio IDE package. Not to worry though if you started with the stand-alone package but then want to shell share with other products. Any/all work done with the stand-alone can be reused after moving to the IDE package. 

Please remember to read the system requirements  before you download.  It references important information like Java Runtime versions, Linux download tips, etc. Also, you can check out the discussion forum if you have questions.

It is our sincere hope that you give this a spin and drop us a line (or add a comment below) about what you think about Data Studio. 

-- Srini Bhagavan