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Welcome to this Java Break with BASIS. Today's topic is all about data. BASIS data and third party data. How we can provide access
to our BASIS data how we can consume third party data from our business applications.
Let's look at our agenda.
Firstly, we will look at the BASIS data access tools and techniques.
We will look at accessing third party data from BBj or from your PRO/5 or Visual PRO/5 application using JDBC and ODBC access.
We will talk about some of the benefits that you'll get from opening up access to your data and utilizing the BASIS toolsets.
And then we'll answer your questions.
Let's firstly look at the overall view of our session today. We are going to be looking at our production systems down here.
So we have BBx applications be they BBj, Visual PRO/5, or PRO/5.
They'll probably be accessing your BASIS data files using READ/WRITE RECORD type statements.
And here we'd have our database server.
So this would contain the data dictionary and the SQL engine to allow access to third party applications -
Microsoft Excel, Open Office, Crystal Reports, iReport writing tool.
And of course we also have the situation where our BBx applications
can access our BASIS data through JDBC and ODBC from BBj or from Visual PRO/5 using ODBC
we can access third party data - Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server etc.
But we can also access all of that from JDBC by utilizing BBj's XCALL functionality from within
Visual PRO/5 or PRO/5. So we have a plethora of access opportunities
and we'll also talk about some of the performance ramifications during today's session.
So, let's talk firstly about database and data file replication. Talk about what it is because this really sets us up to create a 'read only' copy of
our data for data access to a third party tool or to BASIS report writing tools.
So we can replicate specific files or directories from one machine to another,
on the same machine, from different machines on a network and to cloud machines. We can replicate entire databases as well.
And this is all completely transparent to the uses of the production system.
And any changes to the files are replicated and only the changes to the files are replicated making it extremely efficient
and very low overhead on the production system.
So as an example, we can have our primary data sitting here in the BBj primary source. And have PRO/5, Visual PRO/5, or BBj as the
application server accessing that data.
And then we can have a replicated copy of that data. Either files or the data dictionary database itself on the same machine.
Or we can go and replicate that data across a local area network. And finally, we can replicate it across the wide area network
even to a cloud machine.
So what are the benefits? One of the primary benefits is disaster recovery.
We can create a live database backup as well offsite site, local, multiple as I showed earlier.
You never have to bring the server down to impact the uses to do your backup.
You just pause the replication job and do a backup from the remote site.
And that gives you the opportunity to do stateful backup with the users still on the system.
So you can briefly pause the users usage of the production system
and then do a backup on your remote server,
while allowing your users to continue with their production operations.
One of the strongest and one of the most powerful aspects about database and data file replication
is the ability to have a 'read only' database copy for data mining, for warehousing, and for reporting.
That offloads the queries and reports that conserves your resources of your production system
so there's no overload or additional effort being placed on the production server.
And it also can give you the database in closer proximity to the user group.