Tool Suites, MDX, and SQLJ
By Ken North
Staying current as a Web database developer is no simple feat. We must stay abreast of research, emerging technologies, and new products that implement those technologies. In an online article that supplements this column, I explore promising information-retrieval technologies still in the formative stage (see "
Online" for the URL). Here, I discuss technologies that have evolved beyond the research stage and recently become available in shipping software. If you're doing Java development, using SQL databases, or working with multidimensional data, data marts, or data warehouses, you have new solutions to add to your bag of tricks.
Developer Suites
A major trend is the rise of developer suites, increasingly massive collections of tools for application developers that incorporate many different technologies as well as a DBMS server. Oracle's jDeveloper Suite combines Oracle products with products from Symantec, Wallop, Netscape, and WebTrends. The suite includes major Oracle offerings such as Oracle 8 Enterprise Edition and Oracle Application Server, as well as other components. Oracle 8 Enterprise Edition itself has subcomponents such as Parallel Server, ConText Cartridge (a text search engine), Web Publishing Assistant, and so on.
Microsoft has rolled out a similar monolith in the tool suite category, with its Visual Studio Enterprise Edition 6.0
