Altova, creator of XMLSpy and other leading XML, data management, UML, and Web services tools, announced a strategic partnership with IBM. Under the terms of this agreement IBM will actively promote Altova’s line of application development and data management software products as the tools of choice for working with DB2 9, and Altova will build deeper integration with DB2 9 into its products, including groundbreaking document search, query, and exchange capabilities.

“Altova was the clear choice when it came to selecting a tools vendor for our DB2 9 pureXML data server,” said Bernie Spang, director IBM data servers. “Altova XMLSpy is well known in the industry as the de facto standard IDE for XML and is highly regarded by IBM customers. In addition, Altova offers several other XML, data management, and Web services tools that are powerful, easy to use, and, like XMLSpy, already provide essential connectivity to DB2.”

“Altova and IBM share thousands upon thousands of mutual customers, and this partnership is designed to provide them – and anyone needing to access, utilize, or store XML content – with the best possible XML / data server solution,” said Tim Hale, Director of Marketing for Altova. “Bringing together the world’s leading database-enabled XML tools from Altova and the industry’s most advanced XML-enabled data server from IBM in a tightly integrated solution will empower developers and DBAs with unsurpassed information management capabilities.”

Work is already underway on the announced deep integration of Altova’s XML, data management, and Web services tools with the IBM DB2 9 pureXML data server, and the first related product enhancements are expected to emerge from Altova product development and quality assurance in early 2007. Even now, Altova XMLSpy, MapForce, StyleVision, and DatabaseSpy currently provide a myriad of capabilities beneficial to data-oriented technology professionals.

Database-Enabled Altova Products
XMLSpy 2007: XMLSpy is the industry standard XML development environment for modeling, editing, and debugging all XML-related technologies. It offers the industry’s top XML editor, the original graphical schema designer, a code generator, file converters, debuggers, profilers, a revolutionary new WSDL designer, support for SOAP, XSLT, and XQuery, plus Eclipse and Visual Studio .NET integration. XMLSpy 2007 currently supports the following database capabilities:

Connects to IBM DB2 and all major relational databases
Infers XML Schemas from existing database schemas
Imports relational data into XML
Exports XML data to relational databases
Generates database schemas from XML Schemas

MapForce 2007: MapForce is the premier data integration and Web services implementation tool. It provides a visual interface for mapping between any combination of XML, database, flat file, EDI, and/or Web service, then it converts data on-the-fly or auto-generates program code for royalty-free use in data integration or Web services applications. Languages for code generation include XSLT 1.0/2.0, XQuery, Java, C++, and C#. MapForce 2007 currently supports the following database capabilities:

Connects to IBM DB2 and all major relational databases
Converts data from any supported database type to any other
Converts data from one database schema to another
Maps data from XML, flat files, EDI, and/or Web services into databases
Maps data from databases into XML, flat files, EDI, and/or Web services
Connects database data sources to Web services operations