BANGALORE, INDIA: Database products are often complicated and developers go through tough time when it comes to cross platform approach. Providing a balanced productivity and expertise across all database platforms is a big challenge for any company.
Embarcadero Technologies, which empowers application developers and database professionals with tools to design has got set of products for database community to fulfill the need of database community.
In an interview with CIOL, Greg Keller, chief evangelist, Database Gear products, Embarcadero, talked about the Database gear products offered to the developer community and company's offering in open source.
Keller also disclosed that the company is evaluating on opening an office in Bangalore after a long and successful history with the Indian development community. Excerpts from the interview:
CIOL: Can you brief us on Embarcadero Technologies and the Database Gear products offered to developer community?
Greg Keller: Nearly identically to what developers have known and trusted in the CodeGear product line, Embarcadero's Database Gear products have focused exclusively on productivity tooling for database professionals who range from SQL developers, to data architects to database administrators (DBAs) since 1993.
The key to the product line's success, and that of the company's, has been our 'cross platform' approach, where 'platform' in this case means database vendor platform such as Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL and so on. We are well known for abstracting vendor complexity and provide balanced productivity and expertise across all these platforms through unified and efficient UIs.
In recent years, we've witnessed a much greater frequency of full time software developers be required to code directly against the database where they are persisting data.
Two problems arose: a lack of knowledge in SQL nuances of the platform being developed against in addition to broken or distasteful workflow for developers. Developers clearly do not want to traverse out of their trusted IDE into another environment if at all possible to 'finish the job' to simply code SQL. So our approach has been to establish our 15-year legacy and expertise in database technologies within their IDE, such as Eclipse, to ensure they are as productive as possible while injecting our deep SQL expertise into their workflow.
CIOL: Can you elaborate more on the DB Optimizer?
GK: DBOptimizer is an instantiation of many of those philosophies I described above. At its core, the product is a sophisticated SQL IDE offering all of the tooling required to code, profile and ultimately tune SQL. It's a literal "one stop shop" for the production of fully optimize database code.
DBOptimizer is fully cross database platform out of the box, so a user may install and connect to Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, SQL Server and other JDBC data sources to nearly instantaneously understand the catalogues. We have instituted some unique developer features to help write 'tuned' code as the developer is typing…e.g. notifying users on weak JOINs, leveraging database specific optimization features in addition to sophisticated parsing of the database to ensure objects that should be in the query are indeed available.
We want developers to write tuned code before it gets to production! Where it gets interesting is the product's ability to start profiling databases, which is technology not unlike profiling for java or C++.
Users can profile active database transactions over periods of time to peer within the database to determine what could be causing degraded performance. DBOptimizer will graphically display wait times for its end user to visually pinpoint these problematic issues. Ultimately leading the user on interrogating the SQL in order to tune it (e.g., re-write it) to maximize performance.
Lastly, we built this on the Eclipse framework as well to help distribution of the technology as well. A user can deploy this as a standalone RCP or allow itself to be embedded as a plug-in to any Eclipse IDE for developers who need our product to live within their IDE instance.
