Understanding DB2: Learning Visually with Examples (2nd Edition)

4.3. Development Tools

The development tools help you build and deploy stored procedures, user-defined functions, and structured types. There are two tools that fall into this category: the Development Center and the Project Deployment tool.

4.3.1. The Development Center

The Development Center is included with both the Application Development Client and with all DB2 UDB server edition products. This tool helps you build, debug, and test application objects that are stored in the database server, such as stored procedures, user-defined functions (UDFs), and structured types.

Stored procedures allow you to move part of the application logic to the database, providing a centralized location from which you can maintain your code. Because the logic runs at the data base server, stored procedures improve performance by reducing network traffic. UDFs let you extend the SQL language and built-in functions with your own logic. You can write a UDF in C/C++, Java, or SQL Procedural Language to perform operations within any SQL statement that returns a single scalar value or a table. Structured types are useful for modeling objects that have a well-defined structure with attributes, each of which has a data type.

As you can see in Figure 4.22, the Development Center has two view tabs. The Project View tab contains your project with all the stored procedures, UDFs, or structured types stored locally in your machine. The Server View tab displays the stored procedures, UDFs, or structured types that were built successfully, and thus are stored on the database server.

4.3.2. The Project Deployment Tool

When you develop application objects with the Development Center, you can export them to a file as an export script or a project, and deploy them to another (target) database using the Project Deployment Tool, which walks you through several steps. Figure 4.23 shows the step where you have to choose the stored procedures you want to deploy from a list of procedures available in the SAMPLE database.