The use of DB2, specifically in the context of the MicrosoftDevelopment Suite (Visual Studio, which has components of Visual Basic,Visual C++, Visual Interdev, and Visual J++), is described. Thestructure of the book seems good as it appears in the table ofcontents:

(1) Overview

(2) Setting Up the Application Development Environment

(3) Introducing Programming Interfaces

(4) DB2 Server-Side Features

(5) Building Applications Using Visual Basic

(6) Building Applications Using Visual C++

(7) Using Microsoft Transaction Server

(8) Application Development on IIS

(9) Tuning Application Performance

Appendix A: Supported Statements for SQL Procedures

Appendix B: Example DB2 UDB Source Code

Appendix C: Related Publications

Index

Unfortunately, the beginningof the book turns out to be more of a survey than an introduction towhat readers need to know. There is an extensive discussion of the fivedifferent ways one can get from the development environment to thedatabase, with no recommendations about which of these should be used(or, if it is situation-dependent, which tools are appropriate for whichsituations). Potentially more distracting is the discussion of MicrosoftData Objects, which fills 30 pages. The authors note that the earlierversions of these are not really SQL-compliant and probably are nolonger relevant. This level of detail is not necessary in a book that isnot intended as a historical document.

Clearly, the book was written by people whose forte is database,rather than application, development. One of the authors’ proposals isthat, instead of using programmatic logic to verify referentialintegrity, you could default that to the database. That is a truestatement. However, anybody who has ever tried this knows that the userwill then get an error message of the form “You have violated someinternal constraint; please repair it,” instead of “There isno matching customer for this order; please correct the customernumber.”

The programming examples are good, but just that. They demonstrateenough about what is unique to DB2 that a competent Visual Studioanalyst who has already done some database work with another productcould get DB2 to work. This book should not be taken, however, as anintroduction to Visual Studio, or even as a comprehensive guide to howVisual Studio accesses databases. It is a good addition to IBM’s DB2series.