A database connection is a connection from VisualAge to a database through a database manager. You can establish more than one database connection at a time if your DBMS allows multiple connections.
To keep track of your database connections, VisualAge uses something called connection specifications. A connection specification associates an alias, which is a name that you make up to refer to your database, with a VisualAge database manager and a database name or ODBC data source. You might use the alias SampleConSpec, for example, to refer to a connection to the SAMPLE database through DB2. A connection specification serves several purposes:
You can define a connection specification once and use it over and over again in more than one application. If you change the database that an alias points to, then you can automatically update all parts that use that alias.