March 5, 2007

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Level: Intermediate

In today's distributed, web-based development environment, the biggest frustration for developers is having to "hard-couple" their applications to specific database structures, particularly normalized base tables. The key to creating flexible, reusable data structures that can support web services and application objects is to abstract, or decouple, the functionality of the database from its underlying structure. The end goal is to create a rule-based (or "policy-based") data abstraction layer that can be easily changed, and used by multiple application objects and web services. Some of the techniques that will be presented include:

• Views
• Data abstraction layers
• Data access objects
• Data integration services
• Triggers
• Fundamental stored procedures
• Complex data types
• User-defined functions
  

Larry Burns is a database consultant at Paccar, the global truck manufacturer, with 25 years of experience in application development. He works closely with Paccar's senior developers to improve both application development and database development processes and teaches a series of classes designed to educate developers about database issues. He has taught and served on the advisory board for the University of Washington’s certificate program in Data Resource Management. .