DBU Now Accessible Over the Web

May 25, 2010 Alex Woodie

System i users will be able to access ProData Computer Services‘ popular Database Utility (DBU) over the Web when they update to version 9, which was unveiled at the recent COMMON conference in Florida. The Nebraska company also added support for double-byte character sets (DBCS) with DBU version 9, an important requirement for Asian System i shops.

DBU is a handy all-purpose utility that is used by programmers, administrators, and end users to access and update System i data, as well as a number of other related tasks. ProData claims to have sold more than 20,000 licenses of DBU over the years, making it one of the all-time most popular utilities on the i platform.

Users can access DBU from a Web browser with the version 9 release of the product.

With version 9, ProData now allows people to use DBU from any Web browser. ProData has included all of the utility’s previously released functions when accessing the product through the other two supported interfaces, including the standard 5250 green-screen interface and a Java-based plug-in for Eclipse-based development environments. DBU Web can be used against any standard Web browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and others.

ProData owner Allen Hartley says DBU Web was developed in response to customer needs. “This makes DBU a must-have database tool for all System i shops, no matter where you are interface-wise, be it green-screen, GUI or browser-based,” Hartley states in the DBU Web announcement.

Another big enhancement is the DBCS support, which enables DBU to support the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese written languages. Supporting these languages opens a large and growing market of potential customers for DBU, particularly in Japan, which has the most System i servers of any country besides the U.S. China, meanwhile, is growing quite fast.

ProData added several other enhancements with version 9. A new wizard will walk users through the process of setting up access and security for DBU, which is an important consideration given the power of the tool. (DBU was designed to help people, but it could just as easily be used to harm companies.)

Users will be able to execute the DBUJRN command as a batch job with version 9. This release also gains the capability to call an exit program to perform certain actions, such as encryption data fields. ProData also bolstered DBU’s auditing function with the capability to capture data areas and user space modifications in audit logs and journals. Version 9 also brings the capability to perform searches on user spaces.