E-Business Enhancements

The Internet is pervasive. It affects almost every aspect of our IT infrastructure. Almost every business today is developing more Web-enabled applications. In other words, businesses are transforming themselves into e-businesses.

DB2 V7 provides assistance to e-businesses by supporting XML. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML allows tags to be defined by users that describe the data in the document. This helps to make the document somewhat self-describing . XML is quickly becoming the de facto standard for application interfaces, as well as for inter- and intra-organization data transfer.

DB2 V7 supports XML using a new data type extender for XML documents: the XML Extender. The XML Extender is similar to the other extenders for video, image, audio, and text that were added to DB2 V6. The DB2 Extenders combine user-defined distinct types, user -defined functions, and triggers to provide extended data type functionality for DB2 databases.

The XML Extender enables XML documents to be integrated with DB2 databases. By integrating XML into DB2 databases, you can more directly and quickly access the XML documents. You can search and store entire XML documents using SQL. You also have the option of combining XML documents with traditional data stored in relational tables.

When you store or compose a document, you can invoke DBMS functions to trigger an event to automate the interchange of data between applications. An XML document can be stored complete in a single text column, or XML documents can be broken into component pieces and stored as multiple columns across multiple tables.

The XML Extender provides user-defined data types (UDTs) and user-defined functions (UDFs) to store and manipulate XML in the DB2 database. The XML Extender defines UDTs for XMLVARCHAR , XMLCLOB , and XMLFILE . After the XML is stored in the database, the UDFs can be used to search and retrieve the XML data as a complete document or in pieces. The UDFs supplied by the XML Extender include

• Storage functions to insert XML documents into a DB2 database

• Retrieval functions to access XML documents from XML columns

• Extraction functions to extract and convert the element content or attribute values from an XML document to the data type that is specified by the function name

• Update functions to modify element contents or attribute values (and to return a copy of an XML document with an updated value)

Additionally on the e-business front, Net.Data has been enhanced to provide built-in XML exploitation. You can generate XML tags as output from Net.Data macros and use XML style sheets to format and display the generated output.