Final DTP Survey Results October 2010

We had eight people total complete the survey (a big thank you to all of you), which was more than I was expecting honestly. With as quiet as things have been in DTP lately, I was expecting the sound of crickets to be prevalent. :)

However... As promised, here are the final survey results...

Question 1: Where do you use DTP?

a) Standalone in Eclipse for the database functionality (green)

b) Within WTP or Dali (JPA) (red)

c) Within a commercial product from IBM, Oracle, Sybase, or other company (yellow)

d) Other (please specify) (blue)

As I said in my last post, this was a bit surprising to me. I had no idea that this many folks actually used DTP for its standalone database functionality rather than as part of a larger suite.

The responses to "Other" included:

• As part of our tool. For reading database meta data and for parsing SQL (planned).
• BIRT

I'm not sure how I forgot BIRT - it wasn't deliberate. But it's nice to confirm that DTP is in fact being used in a few different contexts.

2. How do you use DTP?

a. As a user

b. As a developer

Definitely more use of the DTP toolset for developers than users, but it's nice to see users represented in there as well.

Question 3: Where would you like to see DTP used?

This was an open-ended question and we ended up with three replies:

• As a replacement for SQuirreL SQL inside Eclipse.
• As more integrated with the IDE
• Or as a standalone RCP SQL Tool like PL/SQL Developer

Question 4: What functionality would you like to see in DTP? Or what changes would you like to see?

This was another open-ended question with more responses:

• Provide documentation about what is supported for each database... e.g. "how do I see an SQL query explain for Sybase ASE or DB2 UDB"?. After hours of experimenting I *think* its not possible but can't tell for sure.
• Offer the ability to specify an order when executing a batch of sql files
• ETL functionality - data extract and load
• Easier handling - see PL/SQL Developer! More DB-Status functions
• Improve the SQL parser as a standalone library

Each of these will probably find their way into Bugzilla as feature requests. And though not all will likely get done, it's good fodder for discussions going forward.

Question 5. Would you like to help with DTP?

There were only three responses - yes, no, and other. The other described itself as "willing to report bugs and test cases", which is great. "No" isn't helpful, but is understood due to a lack of time or resources. And "Yes" is what we always like to hear!

All in all, I'm pleased with the results. We received some constructive feedback in addition to simply discovering that our community still has a heartbeat. :)

As I said last time... If *YOU* have more suggestions for us, feel free to join the mailing list (dtp-dev@eclipse.org) or put a message on the forum/newsgroup and let us know what you're thinking. As always, we're looking for help - whether it's testing and reporting bugs, contributing patches, or becoming a committer!

Thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey. It helps to know what you are thinking!

Have a great Halloween and a wonderful weekend!

Early Survey Results...

Well, I'm happy to report that not only are there people willing to respond to my survey, but they're willing to respond to a survey about DTP! So it's good to know that there are a few people out there who are still alive and kicking in the community. :)

After a week, we've had 7 responders. No, it's not a huge number, but it's honestly better than I was expecting. And we've had some interesting responses...

The answers to the first question about where our users actually use DTP was shocking to me. I had no idea that this many folks actually used DTP for its standalone database functionality rather than as part of a larger suite.

For the second question, overwhelmingly nearly everybody who uses DTP seems to use it more as a developer than as a user.

Some of the responses as to where folks would like to see DTP get used were also interesting:

• As a replacement for SQuirreL SQL inside Eclipse.
• As more integrated with the IDE
• Or as a standalone RCP SQL Tool like PL/SQL Developer

We used to hear a lot about the SQuirreL SQL
angle in the beginning of DTP, but I hadn't heard that mentioned for a while. Sounds like the PL/SQL Developer is a similar request for functionality, but perhaps as a RCP application. We actually started a bit of this effort in the last release that's available in CVS (look in the Enablement project for the org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.rcp plug-in - it's rough, but it's a start).

And then we had some very thought provoking requests for new functionality...

1. Provide documentation about what is supported for each database... e.g. "how do I see an SQL query explain for Sybase ASE or DB2 UDB"?. After hours of experimenting I *think* its not possible but can't tell for sure.
2. Offer the ability to specify an order when executing a batch of sql files
3. ETL functionality - data extract and load
4. Easier handling - see PL/SQL Developer! More DB-Status functions
5. Improve the SQL parser as a standalone library

I'm not quite sure what we'd do for #1 or #4, the rest are pretty self-explanatory. Though we'd love to have any/all of these entered as feature requests in Bugzilla, it's great feedback. We *LOVE* feedback.

Do *YOU* have more suggestions for us? Well, if you haven't already filled out the survey, go ahead and fill it out now (click here for the survey). If you've already filled out the survey, feel free to join the mailing list (dtp-dev@eclipse.org) or put a message on the forum/newsgroup and let us know what you're thinking.

And as always, we're looking for help - whether it's testing and reporting bugs, contributing patches, or becoming a committer!

Thanks to everyone who's filled out the survey so far and thanks in advance to anyone else who does the same!

Where is DTP being used these days?

As we start looking at what will go into DTP (Data Tools Platform) 1.9 for the Eclipse Indigo (June 2011) release, it struck me that we don't know that much about how DTP is being used currently. It's been a while since we "polled the studio audience" to see what was up...

And though we have a skeleton crew now helping us with bug fixes and new features, we'd love to have more folks pitch in to help - whether it's by writing articles or blog posts, reporting bugs, or offering to lend a hand with patches for existing issues or new functionality. However the help is offered, we'll probably consider it!

But we'd love it if you use DTP if you could take some time and please answer a few survey questions:

Click here to take survey

Your answers will help us figure out where our priorities lie for this next release and what we may or may not have help with from the community!

Thanks in advance and I'll write up another blog post with the results a month from now to share those details.

Hope you're having a great week!

--Fitz

(Image from Discovery Education Resources)

DTP at JBoss

Dang there's some serious dust on this blog...

But I saw a demo this morning for some new functionality coming to JBoss Tools by the end of the year that uses DTP connection profiles and several views!

Teiid Designer provides tooling for the Teiid server, which has all kinds of cool functionality. As they say in the Teiid site - "Teiid is comprised of tools, components and services for creating and executing bi-directional data services. Through abstraction and federation, data is accessed and integrated in real-time across distributed data sources without copying or otherwise moving data from its system of record."

In the demo I saw this morning, I saw two disparate data sources - one Oracle, one SQL Server I think - that were then abstracted via a virtual database that could then access both. So this is sort of like ODA in BIRT, which combines data from different sources to create a particular report. But unlike BIRT which is largely a one way funnel of information to the report engine from what I understand, Teiid provides bi-directional support so you can use this abstraction to go back and forth between data sources.

Long story short, I am encouraged by the fact that - without much help from those of us left in DTP - the Teiid tooling guys managed to adopt the connection profile frameworks and reuse a good amount of tooling for their own stuff which had been on their own proprietary technology.

So a big congratulations to the Teiid guys for their work integrating DTP into their tools. :) As soon as our new milestone release of JBT goes live, I'll provide a link to their "New and Noteworthy" page so you can see some screen shots and more about what this cool tool does.

Hopefully we can see more of this kind of integration with DTP and Eclipse and possibly gain some more folks to help keep DTP alive for the future!

I'll try not to let my next post be another 5 months from now... Geez.

UI Design Thoughts...

Hi all...

After the "Future of Open Source" panel at EclipseCon 2010, I've been pondering one of the comments about how open source doesn't do "pretty" well. And I have to admit. We have some issues there. Hopefully e4 will ride in on a white horse and save the day, but like all real white horses I wonder what the downside will be (like the poor squire forced to be on "poop" patrol). We shall see... :)

Anyway, was thinking about this today and today's Dilbert made me laugh my butt off... Imagine if it wasn't a web page, but an Eclipse application... and this is how I feel all too often about my OWN stuff. ;)



--Fitz

More EclipseCon 2010 Thoughts

Hi all...

I try to write up a summary each year I go to EclipseCon documenting what talks I went to, what I thought was interesting, etc.

I've done that here this year on a JBoss Wiki page: https://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-15091

Ignore it if you don't find it useful, but I thought it was a great conference this year. :)

--Fitz

EclipseCon 2010 - Some thoughts

Hi all...

Yes, it's been a long while (again) since I had an opportunity to write here. But after such a great EclipseCon 2010 experience, I feel it would be a disservice to not talk about it. :)

After joining Red Hat in the middle of 2009, I entered the maelstrom of tooling development in the exciting, chaotic world of Red Hat and JBoss. Leaving Sybase was tough, but it was time to do something different after nearly 13 years at New Era and Sybase. But it was a shock to the system to go from the slow and steady of Sybase to the full speed ahead of Red Hat.

That said, I've had little time to spend on DTP at Eclipse. I feel bad about this. But I'm trying to help as much as I can, just like Brian and Hemant from IBM and Linda from Actuate. None of us can spend as much time as we might like on this great project.

So I went to EclipseCon 2010 with a bit of trepidation. How would DTP be received? We really don't have much to show in our Helios release beyond a few fixes here and there.

We had one talk for DTP this year - DTP in the Real World. I spoke about our improved RCP support in DTP and provided a plea for more community involvement. And Ruth Soliani, from the Eldorado Research Institute in Brazil, who spoke about how they used DTP in their MotoDev Development Studio product (with Motorola) to connect to a SQLite database on an Android device. Pretty darn cool stuff there and they were very kind to say nice things about the DTP team. :)

On the first night of the conference, we had a DTP Birds of a Feather (BoF) that was very encouraging. We met Ray and Chris from Ingres who will be helping us out from that side of the DBMS world where they can. We met Shenxue Zhou from Oracle, who we've been trying to help out as we can as well.

So the show of community support was awesome. At EclipseCon 2009, we had a very low attendance to DTP talks and nobody attended the BoF. This year we had 30-40 people attend the DTP talk and 3 people (beyond the DTP PMC) show up, plus one guy who was hoping DTP meant "Desktop Publishing" (Sorry about that!). We had great conversations with Ruth's team, the guys from Ingres, and Shengxoe from Oracle.

Now I'm actually hopeful DTP will survive. And that's a good thing!

A big thanks go to Oisin Hurley and Don Smith who put on a terrific conference this year. Every talk I went to had a good number of people attending and a few were standing room only (like Mik Kiersten's talk about Mylyn!). Not to mention the awesome keynotes and the giant moon robots that looked like something out of The Matrix. :)

Thanks to everyone who attended and especially the DTP community who's coming back to life!

--Fitz