Re: [eclipselink-dev] JPA support for additional database

[Dies Koper <diesk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your quick reply!

You mentioned two conditions for moving a Symfoware platform 
implementation from the incubation component to the full product.

1. enough community acceptance
2. testing

How do you measure the former?
As Symfoware is mainly used in Japan, and my experience with my Japanese
colleagues at least is that more than a few are not comfortable actively 
participating in English-language forums, I expect few or no users 
coming to these forums with questions or telling us their experiences.

About the latter, what kind of testing would you consider sufficient for 
inclusion in the full product?

What we intend to do is:
- run CTS's ejb30 tests with Symfoware as the DB.
- run a few standalone Java SE test applications that use JPA.

You mentioned that you don't have a database conformance suite. Do you 
have any tests that you would like me to run in addition to the above, 
or any particular functions you think we should focus additional testing on?

Or would you like me to try to make a Symfoware DB installation 
available to you for testing?

I am particular interested in having JPA 1.0 functionality working 
correctly on Symfoware. Once I have access to Java EE 6's CTS, I would 
like to test its compliance to JPA 2.0 (although we'll include mappings 
for CASE, NULLIF and COALESCE from the start).

>   At the moment, our test framework is missing a database conformance 
> suite and this is something that would make your contribution easier.  
> Without that suite, we will do our best to help you with your 
> implementation, but you will likely need to be patient with us.

We have the resources and experience available to provide a proper 
platform implementation class. We won't need much help with the 
implementation, but we will need your support (review and acceptance) 
for it.

>   We have an incubation component, and the plan is to include new 
> database platforms in that component so they can be distributed and used 
> by the community.  This will be especially important for databases such 

Do you have to distribute the new platforms separately?
As all are mapped from a regex run against the DB driver metadata, they 
won't clash with or affect the matured platforms.
Your homepage explains which you officially support, so there is no 
confusion about which you consider "ready for production" either.

Three advantages of not separating them that I can think of are:
1. No extra steps for the users to find and install the extra component.
2. No need to more cleanly extract the database platform specific code 
(now in TargetDatabase.java, DatasourcePlatform.java, Platform.java, 
PropertiesHandler.java). Of course it would be nice to clean this up 
some day, but don't let that hold up our contributions.
3. When a platform implementor wants to make a change to for example a 
common class like Platform.java, (s)he will easily see the impact on the 
new platforms too, and can easily update them accordingly.

I think it would help adoption if it is in there by default.

Thanks,
Dies Koper
Fujitsu


Tom Ware wrote:
> Hi Dies,
>
>   The short answer is, yes, we are quite interested in other database
> platforms.
>
>   In the interest of full-disclosure, the longer answer is that we still
> need to do a bit of work to make it easy to make that kind of a
> contribution.
>
>   At the moment, our test framework is missing a database conformance
> suite and this is something that would make your contribution easier.
> Without that suite, we will do our best to help you with your
> implementation, but you will likely need to be patient with us.
>
>   We have an incubation component, and the plan is to include new
> database platforms in that component so they can be distributed and used
> by the community.  This will be especially important for databases such
> as Symfoware where we do not have the ability to test them.  Any new
> database platform will be distributed through that component until they
> get enough community acceptance and testing to be moved to the full
> product.
>
>   In fact, there has been some interest lately in providing a number of
> other database platforms.  This should provide us with the motivation
> necessary to get the incubation component properly set-up.  Hopefully we
> will also find time to create a database conformance test suite - though
> I would be surprised if that happened before our 2.0 release and JPA 2.0.
>
> -Tom
>
> Dies Koper wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> EclipseLink's JPA currently has implementations for almost 20 database
>> platforms.
>> We would like to use EclipseLink's JPA with Symfoware Server, which is
>> Fujitsu's RDBMS.
>> http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/software/symfoware/
>>
>> I would like to create a patch to add Symfoware support to EclipseLink.
>> I think Symfoware is not a famous DB outside of Japan, and as it's not
>> OSS, few of you might have heard of it. It has been around for quite a
>> number of years (I believe V10 is coming out this year), and we have a
>> number of customers in Japan using it.
>>
>> Would you consider reviewing and incorporating a patch for Symfoware
>> support?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dies Koper
>> Fujitsu