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 TEST CENTER Tamino moves forward By Maggie Biggs December 14, 2001 NATIVE XML DATABASES are certainly a promising technology that executives and IT managers will want to weigh carefully when determining enterprise XML strategies. Although the native XML database market is relatively new, several options must be considered.
Using the documentation included with Tamino, we had no problem installing and setting up the database. Although IT staff with XML experience and some understanding of native XML databases should not find the going difficult, administrators and developers without this background might have a tough time getting up to speed. Inclusion of more detailed tutorial materials would help. Version 3.1 shows good improvement in the areas of schema support, application accessibility, and management capabilities. We especially liked Tamino's new Schema Editor, which let us create and modify schema, as well as migrate schema we created with Tamino 2.3 to Tamino 3.1, easily and without incident. During schema creation, administrators define the elements and attributes of an XML document. Software AG has implemented a subset of the XML Schema Language defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in its schema language, TSD 3 (Tamino Schema Definition 3). Using the Tamino Schema Editor enabled us to create schema more rapidly than we could using a text editor. Java additions Tamino 3.1 also provides useful accessibility additions that will enable Java-based enterprises to more easily use the native XML database. In particular, a new Java API is included that supports DOM 2 (Document Object Model), JDOM (Java Document Object Model), and SAX 2 (Simple API for XML). The addition of the API and support for these standards makes it easier for developers to incorporate XML documents from Tamino databases into Java applications. We had no trouble implementing Java-based access to Tamino, and we particularly liked Tamino's support for session and transaction management. If you've implemented a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application server, you can use the new Tamino EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) API and the Tamino EJB Resource Manager. In our testing, we used these J2EE components to create and execute e-commerce transactions, and discovered some limitations in the Tamino EJB Resource Manager. For example, the transactions created by our Tamino EJB Resource Manager could access only a single Tamino XML Server. We were not able to process transactions across both of our installed Tamino XML Servers, nor could we execute transactions that accessed both Tamino and other data sources in the same transaction. Developers using Tamino 3.1's EJB Resource Manager will need to process transactions against a single Tamino instance. Separate processing will be needed to include other Tamino XML databases or other data sources. Web developers who want to include XML components in Web pages should examine another Software AG tool: Tamino X-Application supplies JSP (JavaServer Pages) tags that you can embed in HTML pages to provide access to the Tamino database. X-Application supports common functions, such as queries, document maintenance, and browsing. Using X-Application, we were able to include query functionality in several Web pages without trouble. You can download X-Application free at www.softwareag.com/developer/x-application/default.htm. Managing Tamino Administrators will find Tamino 3.1 much improved over the previous version. For example, a new batch facility allows database administrators to create and execute scripts against Tamino. We used this facility to automate several tasks, such as backing up several databases we created. A new bulk data transfer utility, the Tamino Data Loader, will also make life easier for administrators. Enterprise administrators might use the Data Loader to stage large numbers of XML documents in collections in the Tamino database prior to exchange with trading partners. Tamino's browser-based administrative console is nicely integrated with operating-system security, allowing us to access it using our operating-system administrative log-on. However, browser support for the console is limited to Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Tamino's management console is very good; administrators will have all the tools they need to manage multiple databases. In addition to allowing us to monitor tasks that were executing on our local instance of Tamino 3.1, the management console gave us access to operating-system parameters, such as the system process list. The System Management Hub, also accessible from the console, is another nice feature that administrators will definitely find useful. We used the System Management Hub to add other hosts that were running Tamino. We were able to manage Tamino 3.1 on two separate systems, as well as an instance of Tamino 2.3 on the second system. Finally, accessing data from the Tamino 3.1 database is straightforward. We used Tamino's Interactive Interface to query documents in various collections. Tamino currently supports X-Query, which is based on the XPath specification. Software AG is participating in W3C efforts to create a new query language -- XQuery -- and the company plans to implement the final specification of the official W3C query language when it becomes available. For enterprises that need to manage XML documents in heterogeneous data environments, Tamino 3.1 is definitely worth a look. With querying standards yet to fall into place for native XML databases, Tamino is still not a completely mature solution, but its good query support, broader support for Java applications, and capabilities for managing multiple databases push it beyond most competitors. Contributing Editor Maggie Biggs (maggie_biggs@infoworld.com) has more than 15 years of business and IT experience in enterprise settings.
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