Ameritech’s Applied Data Research Inc, based in Princeton, New Jersey, says it shipped the first copies of its Ideal applications development system for IBM’s DB2 mainframe relational database earlier this month. The company reckons the product is the first full development system for DB2 and claims it provides a single environment for developing, testing, executing and maintaining DB2 applications. It has a complete applications dictionary and supports batch and on-line applications and SQL, which can appear natively within an Ideal application or can be generated automatically from Ideal constructs. Ideal uses dynamic SQL for application testing and static SQL for production use and is integrated with the DB2 catalogue for all DB2 data definitions. Ideal developers can use databases, tables and views already defined to DB2, and the full 18-character name supported by the DB2 catalogue, the firm says, pointing out that other products support DB2 but are incompatible with its naming conventions. It offers the choice of embedded SQL or SQL generated through the Ideal high-level language, and ADR says that in either case, the same object code is created and executed against DB2. The applications dictionary is maintained as a set of DB2 tables. Available now, Ideal for DB2 runs under MVS and MVS/XA and costs $175,000 for a permanent licence.
