Real World Experience: Integrating DB2 with XPages

AD 112: Real World Experience:
Integrating DB2 with XPages
Steve Zavocki Navy Federal Credit Union Consultant
Dwain Wuerfel Navy Federal Credit Union

Real World Experience: Integrating DB2 with XPages
About Steve
 Notes Developer since 1996
 Exclusively XPages since 2012
 Fluent in Java, and use it whenever possible
 Have been a consultant with Navy Federal
since April 2014 working out of Milton,
Florida
 Blog: http://notesspeak.blogspot.com/
 Email: zavocki@hotmail.com
 Twitter: @szavocki

About Dwain
 Notes Developer since 1997
 XPages since 2011
 Have been an employee with Navy Federal
since July 2014 working out of Milton, Florida
 Blog: www.xpagesnewbie.wordpress.org
 Email: dwainwuerfel@gmail.com
 Twitter: @dwainwuerfel

About Navy Federal Credit Union
 The world’s largest credit union
 $69 billion in assets and over 5.5 million members
 Approximately 12,000 employees worldwide
 Member-owned and not-for-profit
 We offer credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, checking and savings, CDs, IRAs and
our subsidiary Navy Federal Financial Group offers investments & insurance
 Navy Federal: Field of Membership
•We serve all Department of Defense and Coast Guard active duty, civilian and contractor
personnel and their families
•We have 270 branches worldwide; online, mobile account access, and call center 24/7
 FORTUNE's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015
 Fifth time selected
 ComputerWorld’s 2015 Best Place to Work in IT

Agenda
 Why use DB2?
 Application Overview
 Application Design
 DB2 configuration
 Lessons Learned
 What your DBA wants you to know

Why Use DB2?
 Performance
 Why is this important to NFCU?
 References

Why Use DB2?
 Performance
 DB2 z/OS, DB2 LUW, Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, and Notes
 Navy Federal uses all these, but chose DB2 for XPages back-end
 Timestamp data type to the one millionth place
 Both Notes and Java only use one thousandth
Notes/Java: 07:50:25.123000
DB2: 07:50:25.123456

Why Use DB2?
 Performance cont’d…
 10 or 10,000,000 rows irrelevant
 Don’t try this using a Notes database
 Physical storage is allocated for future growth
 This means you never encounter an out of space condition
 Moves large quantities of data and manages high volume of transaction
 Potential for large volumes of transactions
 DB2 has data sharing which is similar to replication/clustering
 Know that this exists, DBA should already be using this

Why Use DB2?
 Why is this important to Navy FCU you ask
 Navy FCU measures success as “No Perceived Downtime”
 XPages uses DB2 as a back-end due to the existing transactional member/customer
facing applications
 Auditing
 Security Concerns

Why Use DB2?
 Comparison with Oracle
 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/rte/breakfree/tw.html
 More information about the benefits of DB2
 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/family/

Application Overview

Application Overview
 In a nutshell, the application manages ATM by providing a web browser front-
end to a mainframe application
 This application replaces having a person use the green screen, and it
eliminates tedious data entry into an MS Access database
 All actions that take place whether user initiated or scheduled are recorded in
DB
 The data is then used for reporting and searching

Application Design

Application Design
 Employ Best Practices learned by personal and collective experiences
 Minimize SSJS. Use Java for business logic whenever feasible
 Try to follow the MVC design pattern
 Considered using object relational mapping (i.e. Hibernate)
 Considered other developers who later will work on the application

Application Design
View Layer – UI
• XPages
• Custom Controls
Controller Layer – Business Logic
• Managed Beans
• POJOs
• Jars (server JVM/LIB/EXT folder)
Model Layer – Data
• DB2 running on mainframe
via SQL
via ???

Application Design
How is the DB2 tied to the UI elements?
viewScope is the glue that ties it all together.
 IMO it is easier to code than managed bean
members/fields
 Load it when you need it, no values are remembered
when you leave the page
 All purpose… Binds UI fields or grid data
 No need to initialize numeric data type, everything is
treated like a String in a scoped variable

Demo

During the demo, I showed how the front end is constructed where all UI controls are bound to
viewScope. This is an example of one field.

Next we also demo’d how each event uses SSJS to communicate to the java in the controller layer

Finally, I showed the java code that contained the data access. (This is part 1 of 3) Emphasis was
placed on the need to get a handle to viewScope in each method.

Java method continued (Part 2 of 3): Emphasis placed on how the SQL is constructed in the java
code. Emphasis also placed on how the result is written back to the UI

Java method continued (Part 3 of 3): Emphasis placed on the need to close out resources in the
Finally clause. Also note that this code shows having to write a fake date of ‘9999-12-31’ to columns
incorrectly built as ‘NOT NULL’ by the DBA. Referenced on slide 36, point 4.

DB2 Configuration

DB2 Configuration
 Device Drivers
 Extension Library
 java.policy
 WinSQL
 Custom Connection Manager

DB2 Configuration
 Device Drivers
 It depends on your DB2 version which drivers you use. Your DBA or Middleware
team will provide these for you
 We installed on the server in the jvm/lib/ext location. The choice was not ours to
make (IBM does not recommend this approach but instead recommends installing
as OSGI plugin)
 You do not need to install DB2 drivers locally, unless you are writing Java or LS
agents that will access DB2, and you want to test them locally. If you do then they
need to be in your local jvm/lib/ext

DB2 Configuration
 Extension Library
 The XPages Extension Library is of course required
 The version that is bundled with 9.0 is not enough
 We couldn’t get the database connection to work using a 9.0.1 at all until we
installed at least the Dec 19, 2014 version from OpenNTF

DB2 Configuration
 java.policy
 You should be aware that this file exists on your domino server
 This file is used to control security permissions for specific actions and locations
 If you put your jars in the jvm/lib/ext directory then you will want to make sure
your java.properties files grants full access:
grant codeBase "file:${java.home}/lib/ext/*" {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

DB2 Configuration
 WinSQL – You will certainly need a tool for easily testing your SQL. Our
company has standardized on WinSQL for this task.
 This product is offered by Synametrics and info can be found at:
http://web.synametrics.com/WinSQL.htm
 Cost is $99 for a developer license
 Comparable to Toad, SQL Developer (Oracle)

DB2 Configuration WinSQL

DB2 Configuration
 Custom Connection Manager
 NFCU has a policy that usernames and passwords are not to be kept in XML
files
 We created a custom ConnectionManager class that allows us to look to a
secure database for credentials and still allow the use of Connection Pooling
 More information on how to do this can be found on Steve’s blog at
http://notesspeak.blogspot.com/

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned
 Know what you need from your DBA
 Take the time ahead of time to understand your application requirement
 Be sure that column widths and types are correct before coding
 Mimic what Notes databases give you by default by having system columns for
Created Date, Last Updated, Author, Last Updated By
 Do not let DBA arbitrarily specify columns to be se to NOT NULL
 Ask your DBA to consider using a stored procedure or trigger to update
intermediate tables for that are needed for many-to-many data relationships

Lessons Learned
 Know what you need from your DBA
 Ask your DBA to consider using a stored procedure or trigger to update
intermediate tables for that are needed for many-to-many data relationships

Lessons Learned
 Use the PreparedStatement class
 The PreparedStatement is a class in the java.sql package that makes it easy to
generate SQL statements
 This class protects against SQL Injection, use of this coding class is a company
standard
 This class protects against bad data causing errors

Lessons Learned
 Yes this really happened
String userCity = “D'Iberville”);
int userTaxDue = 0;
Date userTaxDue = taxDueDate;
String userID = “12345”;
String sqlUpdate = "UPDATE USER_DETAIL SET USER_CITY = ‘” + userCity +
“’, USER_TAX_DUE_AMT = “ + userTaxDue + “, USER_TAX_DUE_DT = “ +
userTaxDue + “ WHERE USER_ID = “ + userID;

Lessons Learned
 Using the PreparedStatement class
String sqlUpdate = "UPDATE USER_DETAIL SET USER_CITY = ?,
USER_TAX_DUE_AMT = ?, USER_TAX_DUE_DT = ? WHERE USER_ID = ?";
PreparedStatement ps = null;
ps = conn.prepareStatement(sqlUpdate);
ps.setString(1, “D'Iberville”);
ps.setInt(2, 0);
ps.setDate(3, new Date());
ps.setString(4, “12345”);
ps.executeUpdate();

This is the code from theme that was set to load on every page.
<resource>
<content-type>application/x-javascript</content-type>
<href>js/jquery.datepick.min.js</href>

</resource>
<resource>
<href>js/jquery.datepick.validation.js</href>
</resource>
Lessons Learned
 Bonus Lesson (if time allows, game time decision)
 This doesn’t have anything to do with DB2, but one major issues we had was
sporadic 403 errors when we deployed from our UNIT to INTG environment.
 The issue turned out to be resources that the server was trying to load on the
anonymous login page.

Lessons Learned
 Resolution to the evil 403 problem (thanks @edm00se)
 Fix was to change the theme to skip loading the resources on the login page
<resource rendered="#{javascript:view.getPageName() !== '/login.xsp'}">
<href>js/jquery.datepick.min.js</href>
</resource>
<resource rendered="#{javascript:view.getPageName() !== '/login.xsp'}“>
<href>js/jquery.datepick.validation.js</href>
</resource>

What your DBA wants you to know…

What your DBA wants you to know
 DB2 Explain (Optimizer)
 Understand requirements prior to approaching DBA
 You and you alone own your data
 Take time upfront to save time/frustration in the end
 Maintain data integrity
 Table structure and their relationship

 DB2 Explain
 Shows the strength/weakness of your SQL
 Shows cost of running SQL
 Checks syntax
 Displays path taken to obtain data
 IBM Data Studio is the product used to display DB2 Explain results

 DB2 Explain using IBM Data Studio

 Understand requirements prior to approaching DBA
 All existing views shouldn’t become a table in DB2
 Final decision out of your hands now that you have to deal with a DBA
 You and you alone own your data
 Don’t ask DBA for help with data issues until you check your code
 Decimal datatype allows for setting decimal places before and after (xxx.xxxxx)

 Take time upfront to save time/frustration in the end
 You don’t have total control over design so take time to think about it
 Insert timestamp has always been available with DB2
 Update timestamp is called a DB2 RowChangeTimestamp that was new in v9
 Insert/Update timestamp have zero cost for including in tables

 Maintain data integrity
 Ensure data elements for dates are a date/time not text
 Number data elements contain numbers not text
 DB2 won’t allow incorrect data
 DBA does build as many safeguards possible to prevent erroneous data
 Table structure and their relationship
 DBA’s have knowledge so utilize that and don’t be afraid of them
 Drop-downs will be made into a table to maintain data integrity

Questions
Blog: http://notesspeak.blogspot.com/
Email: zavocki@hotmail.com
Twitter: @szavocki
Blog: www.xpagesnewbie.wordpress.org
Email: dwainwuerfel@gmail.com
Twitter: @dwainwuerfel

Real World Experience: Integrating DB2 with XPages

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