Java-Enabled Databases and Adaptive Servers
By Ken North
When I started collecting a paycheck as a programmer, my first assignment was to develop a COBOL compiler that included extensions to handle databases. The target market was IBM mainframe sites, so my employer decided to cancel the project when we learned that IBM was adding database extensions to its COBOL. Our decision may have been premature. Chris Date was working on the IBM project and he told me IBM put its project on the back burner for years. Other companies eventually released products that embedded database calls in compiled languages. Today, we have come full circle. Instead of database-enabled languages, vendors are introducing language-enabled databases. The language du jour is Java, and innovative companies such as Sybase have given us Java-enabled databases. This month we'll explore how to develop Java classes to install in a Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) database.
Figure 1 illustrates a scenario in which a Java-enabled browser connects to a Web server that has a database connection to Sybase Adaptive Server. The Web server stores Java classes that it downloads to the browser when the user navigates to a page having a Java applet. The database stores Java classes that Adaptive Server executes when a user runs an SQL query that references a Java object. It isn't necessary for a browser to embed the Java Virtual Machine (VM) to process HTML pages.
