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Startup Vembu Technologies has unveiled an SQL conversion tool thats designed to parse any relational database dialect and automatically convert SQL queries into other SQL dialects.
Vembu SwisSQL is an API designed to relieve DBAs (database administrators) of the need to port SQL queries. The idea is to write only one SQL query that can be converted to other database dialects in a heterogeneous database environment.
Vembu CEO Sekar Vembu said that the tool is aimed at mitigating portability problems that arise from the fact that relational databases dont completely follow the standard-language SQL—i.e., ANS-89, ANSI-92 and the latest ANSI-99—for querying and updating data.
“Most of them only implement an entry-level ANSI standard,” Vembu said. “They all support similar features, but the SQL syntax is often proprietary and does not conform to the ANSI standard. So you have different SQL dialects: Oracle [Corp.] dialect, [Microsoft Corp.] SQL Server dialect, [IBM] DB2 dialect, etc., etc.”
These variations plague DBAs, according to Joe Celko, vice president of RDBMS at North Face Learning, a Salt Lake City IT training firm, and the author of various books on database technology. “One of the major problems in SQL is the dialects of the language,” he said in a statement. “Even if you attempt to write pure, standard SQL-92, you cannot escape rewriting code from one product to another. They disagree about data types, rounding and truncation, vendor-defined functions, and even their temporal data model. Even worse, sometimes they are just close enough that you cannot see the difference. What looks like the same syntax has different semantics.”
SwisSQL is offered as an API with a JDBC wrapper interface for J2EE application developers or as a GUI console for DBAs and developers to manually convert SQL from one dialect to another. SwisSQL 1.0 supports Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and ANSI-SQL databases. Future releases will support Sybase Inc. and SAP databases.
Vembu, of Chennai, India, is offering a 30-day free evaluation of SwisSQL, which can be downloaded here. The company is also offering free technical support during the evaluation period.
Pricing for a single-developer license for the SwisSQL API is $495. The SwisSQL console GUI costs $145 per user.
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