Oracle FAQ Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid
HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US
 

Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> DataArchitect database design tool - is there a better product for Oracle?

DataArchitect database design tool - is there a better product for Oracle?

From: Mark Greaves <mgreaves_at_berger.com>
Date: 1998/05/21
Message-ID: <6k1gur$57v$1@news-2.csn.net>#1/1

I have recently taken over maintaining an Entity-Relationship Diagram in the DataArchitect tool of Powersoft's Power Designer (or Process Data Model, as it is called in DataArchitect). I am having a few problems with this product, and wonder if others have had similar troubles, and if there is a better tool available. Of course, I can't help but wonder, since Powersoft was bought out by Sybase, if it is wise to use this product for an Oracle database!

Here are the problems I have encountered:

  1. It does not allow for the definition of combination triggers, such as "insert or update or delete". Triggers have to be coded as ONLY insert, or ONLY update, or ONLY delete.
  2. It creates redundant constraints. For each primary key column, it creates a separate NOT NULL constraint, which is unnecessary in Oracle, since primary keys by definition have to contain a value. This doesn't cause any errors in the database, but these extra constraints just clutter things up. I can't find any option to not create them either.
  3. It generates triggers for referential constraints, which handle the updating, deleting, etc. of child records when the parent is modified. This often causes "mutating table" errors in oracle - a trigger can't modify a table which is linked by a constraint. I would much rather take care of my foreign key relationships through constraints than with these generated triggers.
  4. As for the diagramming tool itself, I find it rather awkward to use. By default, it tends to plot connector lines on top of each other, and crossing through unrelated tables on their way from a child table to a parent table. And the labels are placed in ways that make it very difficult to tell which line the label refers to. After spending many hours cleaning this all up, I was able to create a presentable diagram. But then when I made one minor change (added a column to a table), the entire diagram reverted back to its default! Very annoying!!!

It's possible that some of these problems are due to my lack of experience with this tool. But I have spent a fair amount of time going through the help files and manuals, and was not able to find solutions to the above problems. Any comments or advice will be appreciated!

Mark Greaves Received on Thu May 21 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT

Original text of this message

HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US