New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services
August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie
A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.
The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The IBM i server, as a transactional workhorse designed for traditional workloads, likely won’t run many of these software products directly (with the exception of the Apache Kafka real-time streaming data system, which runs on IBM i via PASE). But there’s definitely an appetite in the IBM i installed base to consider and explore how IBM i data and applications can be hooked into these emerging new technologies.
That’s essentially what the new DbToo SDK looks to do. According to the documentation on the DbToo GitHub site, DbToo provides an IBM i-resident framework for integrating data and applications running on IBM i to a host of external services.
DbToo can enable an IBM i developer to create a connection between AI models available under IBM watsonx and the IBM i server and pass data to the AI model. For instance, the “watsonx_generate” function enables users to call the 8 billion parameter watsonx Granite 3 model and have it generate a response based on the input message sent from the IBM i. Other functions developed for watsonx handle authentication, setting API keys, setting project ID, and logging out.
Ollama, which is a repository of LLMs and other foundation AI models, is another target of DbToo. Like it does for watsonx, the integration with Ollama allows users to send a piece of data from IBM i as input to an Ollama model, which then generates a text-based reply. DbToo also includes various utility functions for setting servers, ports, models, etc.
DbToo also offers support for OpenAI-compatible API endpoints like Llama.cpp, LMStudio, LocalAI, vLLM, or any self-hosted solutions that offer OpenAI-compatible APIs.
In addition to popular AI models, the experimental SDK also supports messaging platforms, like Kafka. The DbToo website says it requires the Confluent Platform to be installed on the IBM i. Once that prerequisite is taken care of, DbToo can do things with Kafka, such as publishing a message from IBM i to a Kafka topic. The SDK also includes a range of utility functions, such as setting up Kafka brokers, setting up ports, etc.
The DbToo functions for Slack and Twilio follow a similar pattern as they do for Kafka, namely, they allow the user to send a message to Slack and Twilio, and get some response back.
Interestingly, DbToo also includes functionality for PASE, the AIX runtime in IBM i that many open source products utilize to run on the IBM i. DbToo allows users to call a PASE program, send some type of input to the PASE program, and get a response back.
The DbToo project is still quite green, and the project creators caution against using it for any production use cases. Even though it shouldn’t be relied upon yet, it does represent another potentially interesting open source path that could open up the IBM i to the big world beyond, and that’s a good thing.
You can access the DbToo GitHub page at https://ibm.github.io/AI-SDK-Db2-IBMi/.
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