Introduction to DSCop

DSCop is an open source tool that analyzes IBM InfoSphere DataStage jobs and reports information such as violation of some commonly accepted best practices. It's developed in C# and provides plugin based architecture to allow 3rd party extensibility. The tool comes with a few sample plugins that should be enough for basic understanding how the tool works and how to implement your own plugins.

Requirements

Computer running version of Microsoft Windows with .NET Framework 4 preinstalled.

Download and Install

The current publicly available version of DSCop is RC1 available here. After download unzip the file and you are ready to use the tool.

Basic Usage Scenario

The tool will automatically search the folder where the DSCop.exe file is located and will load all the plugins. Each plugin contains one or more rules. Each rule enforces certain check that is performed on  a DataStage job. The jobs should be exported to one or many xml files.

To check a job with the tool, use this syntax:

DSCop jobfilename.xml

As a result you will get a list with rules that were executed, jobs processed, rule violations found.

A sample output after running the tool is shown here:

DataStage has the ability to export multiple jobs into singe XML file. However if your jobs are not in one file you can use wildcards to specify them like this:

DSCop Staging*.xml

Advanced Usage Scenario

Now we are going to explore some of the advanced use cases where you want to run the tool by including/excluding certain rules.

The syntax for running the tool by explicitly enumerating the rules you want to execute is:

DSCop jobfile.xml –include RuleName1 RuleName2 RuleName3

A sample output using this syntax is shown bellow:

Please notice the “*Ignore” next to the rules that are not enforced.

To exclude certain rules use the following syntax:

DSCop jobfile.xml –exclude RileName1, RuleName2, RuleName3

Sample Plugins

The RC1 version of the tool comes with the following plugins/rules:

• CoreRules/StableSortRule – checks all Sort stages whether the StableSort=true. StableSort is enabled by default but should not be used due to decreased performance.
• CoreRules/TeradataConnectorParametersRule – checks all Teradata connector stages whether the ServerName/Username/Password properties are parameterized. Hardcoding this information should be avoided.
• NamingRules/PrefixNamingRule – checks if stage names are following predefined naming convention. The naming convention is described in a the file NamingPrefixes.xml located in the same folder as the plugin.

Feedback

You can send your feedback to the following email: dscoptool-at-gmail.com