Seeing it all in action...
You can see the OLE_DB_2_MSACCESS_NORTHWIND_CUSTOMERS function
within the User-Defined Functions folder. This function was used to
populate the MSACCESSCUSTOMERS table and is called each time an SQL
statement is run against the VIEW_OVER_MSACCESS_CUSTOMERS view.
For example, you can use IBM Data Studio to look at the data
from the VIEW_OVER_MSACCESS_CUSTOMERS table, as shown below:
Naturally, if you compared this result set to the same query
run natively in Microsoft Access, you would end up with the same results:
Of course, any method you use to access the table or view
that you created will return data to your application. For example, in the
following figure you can see I called the same view using the DB2 command line
processor (CLP):
Remember that if you deleted the NORTHWIND database, or
changed its location, the table would continue to operate just fine (since the
data was imported into it by the function you created), but the view would
fail:
Notice that the columns are still available? This is
because there is a meta-data layer for this function within DB2 9.5. So here is
another nuance you should be aware of when using these kinds of functions: if
someone moves the data, your objects can break. With IBM Information Server,
there are health indicators that are surfaced when a nickname over a remote
data server become invalid.
Wrapping it up...
In this article, I took you through the steps involved in creating
an OLE DB function to integrate data from a broad spectrum of data sources, in
this case, specifically Microsoft Access. You saw that this feature can be
handy and that with IBM Data Studio you didn’t have to write a single line of
code to make this all happen. In my next article, I’m going to show you how you
can use IBM Data Studio to create an SQL statement.
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See All Articles by Columnist Paul C. Zikopoulos
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Copyright International Business Machines Corporation, 2007.
All rights reserved.
Disclaimer
The opinions, solutions, and advice in this article are from
the author’s experiences and are not intended to represent official
communication from IBM or an endorsement of any products listed within. Neither
the author nor IBM is liable for any of the contents in this article. The
accuracy of the information in this article is based on the author’s knowledge
at the time of writing.
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