Altova recently announced the availability of Version 2010 Release 3 (v2010r3) of the Altova MissionKit, an integrated suite of XML, database, and UML tools. This latest release provides a range of usability and performance enhancements as well as integration with Visual Studio 2010 and support for industry standards such as iXBRL and National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

With this release, each of the tools available in the Altova MissionKit 2010r3, including XMLSpy 2010r3, MapForce 2010r3, StyleVision 2010r3, UModel 2010r3, DatabaseSpy 2010r3, DiffDog 2010r3, provides new features.

DatabaseSpy 2010r3 Altova's multi-database query, design, and compare tool, for example, now allows users to easily process binary data in a column of database table that is defined as a binary data type, Altova product marketing manager David McGahey tells 5 Minute Breifing. With this capability, users can now upload binary data into the table from an external file, or save binary data from the database to an external file. Supported data types include BLOB, raw, binary, varbinary, image, and others depending on the database type. "Whatever it is, we can process it successfully."

In other product updates, with the release of v2010r3, the XMLSpy XML editor adds new usability enhancements to its graphical schema editor, including the ability to validate internal naming and coding conventions. The enhanced XMLSpy graphical schema editor allows schema designers to validate naming and coding conventions outside of the capabilities of the XML Schema standard. This new functionality is of key importance for users working with NIEM, a U.S. Government XML-based standard, when implementing their information sharing exchanges. XMLSpy 2010r3 also integrates with Visual Studio 2010, adding to its existing support for VS 2005 and VS 2008.

A complete list of all the new features in the Altova MissionKit 2010r3, many of which, McGahey says, have been added based on customer requests, is available here. Free 30-day trials of all Altova products are available here.