New portlets for transparent access and manipulation of databases

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Data access, data management and data integration have just got easier thanks to new OGSA-DAI portlets developed by the University of Westminster. The portlets hide some of the complexity of OGSA-DAI and free the user from having to know about OGSA-DAI’s APIs or perform/request documents. This allows users to use all of OGSA-DAI’s capabilities—accessing, querying and updating heterogeneous data resources and delivering data between external locations—with only a generic knowledge of databases.

The ServiceManager portlet allows connections to be established with an existing OGSA-DAI service. Resources can then be listed, resource properties examined and the database schemas viewed.

The DataBrowser portlet enables the content of selected data resources to be browsed, with the results being displayed on screen.

The QueryManager portlet allows queries to be executed against selected databases. Users provide the query statement in its native language (e.g. SQL) and the portlet takes care of the OGSA-DAI operations and transformations in the background. Results are either displayed on screen or delivered to a set of files via GridFTP.

Finally, the ManipulationManager portlet enables the updating of database content via either an update query or by delivering content from a set of files.

The portlet set can use the Grid Security Infrastructure and X.509 certificates for authentication and security. The current portlet implementation supports the OGSA-DAI WSRF 2.2 release and is available to all NGS users as part of the NGS P-GRADE portal (https://grid2-portal.cpc.wmin.ac.uk:8080).

Tamas Kiss, Gabor Terstyanszky, University of Westminster

kisst@wmin.ac.uk