Almost every industry has established IT infrastructure consisting of multiple technology solutions from multiple vendors. This complexity requires developing and managing applications that manipulate data from multiple data sources and database vendors. These issues are compounded when developers have to switch between different development and database administrative tools when they are working with disparate sources.

These are the kinds of business problems that are solved by the efficient use of the Eclipse Based Foundation Toolkit for Heterogeneous Database Applications project. Using this tool, application developers have a single integrated development environment that can be used to create, deploy, and debug data centric applications. Built to extend the Eclipse framework and SQL model components, the tool combines Eclipse technology and shared repository extensions for database development that are provided by the IBM database team. You can install the tool seamlessly into existing Eclipse 3.4.1 installations.

How does it work?

• Connect to your DB2, Informix, or MySQL database. The tooling is database agnostic, so tasks that you perform on different data sources have a common look and feel.
• Browse the objects in your database by using the Data Source Explorer view. This view is easy to navigate and search and provides context sensitive actions based on each database object.
• Manage your database objects by performing operations such as create/alter/drop for data objects such as tables, indexes, views, triggers, and constraints.
• Use the graphical Data Object editor to create and modify data objects and easily generate and execute DDL scripts based on your changes. This editor helps you to efficiently navigate each database object by the use of a tabbed property framework.
• Use text and graphical editors to create SQL scripts. The SQL text editor understands the underlying database syntax and uses color highlighting for clarity.
• You can also parse SQL statements from the editor. Execute SQL scripts and view the results of your execution all in the same interface.
• Use the routine development infrastructure to create and execute SQL stored procedures and user-defined functions against the server. In this tool, the data development project is hidden as much as possible and menu items are provided in the menu bar for common routine development tasks such as: New, Open, Deploy, Run, and Debug.

Note: This technology is closely related to IBM Data Studio Tools.