Note: This is not a programming question (at least at the moment). Once I start progressing further would seek assistance from the community on programming questions. Feel free to delete this, if this question is deemed inappropriate.
I am trying to start using DashDB as a Database on Bluemix. The DashDB data would be consumed by a Java/Java EE app
I am not planning to use this as a Data warehouse.
DashDB as I understand it has two flavours - Regular (using this term loosely here to refer to the standard offering ) and DashDB Transactional.
DashDB Transaction, i believe is used for transactional workloads.
The dashDB Transactional Bluemix plan provides a dashDB database that is optimized for online transaction processing (OLTP). This means that it is designed for highly structured repetitive processing and it supports ACID transactions. That said you should use all the best practices you would use with a classic RDBMS: normalization, constraints and so on. I confirm that the dashDB-JPA integration is not well documented yet, but there should be no particular problem in using it with JPA. Since your application will run on Liberty Runtime, when you bind the dashDB service instance the server.xml is automatically configured with dataSource with a JNDI name and the database driver jars are also added.