Currently IPM supports packaging of IRIS items (classes, routines etc.) either as source files or Studio projects. Both these approaches have the following drawbacks:

• Difficulty to handle items that were deleted on upgrade
• Compilation/loading of items happens at runtime which is prone to risk

Database packaging provides the following benefits:

• An upgrade would involve simply swapping out of an IRIS.DAT file.
• We wouldn't have to deal with transactions/rollback on upgrade
• Plays better with container layers (needs more elaboration)

Some dev notes:

• IPM itself would need to be mapped from a different database when running this for a given namespace
• How to handle where IPM module persistence is stored (keep it in routine db, copy to application db, handling update steps etc.)