Re: Relation ship

"Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_exxesolutions.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:3F34164D.322C32A9_at_exxesolutions.com...
> Sybrand Bakker wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 08:22:48 -0700, Daniel Morgan
> > <damorgan_at_exxesolutions.com> wrote:
> >
> > >Tools ... any entity relationship diagraming ... Designer, ERwin, Visio
> > >Professional
> > >
> > >Otherwise ...
> >
> > What if the database has no foreign keys at all?
> >
> > Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA
> >
> > To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address
>
> Then it is basically a bunch of electronic 3x5 cards.
>
> Throw them up in the air and let some deity sort it all out.
>

Nice idea, comes up to me several times a day ;-) ... "If only I could make this world a better place ..."

Unfortunately, meanwhile I got the impression the the _major_ part of production dbs
are set up without any fks, it is all "virtual", in the data ... "smart and flexible as needed" ...
It is a mess, _and_ it is de-facto standard. Or am I (still hopefully) wrong ? ...

... or if they have fks, they forget to put the right indexes, causing heavy full table locking ...
this must be why they always try to avoid fk constraints: they do not set them up properly.
Ignorance rulez ...

(Sigh)

Back to the topic, RE of data models is the worst work to do when having no or few FKs.
It will take weeks and months, and even then You cannot be sure that You have completed the job.
It is only one part to see the tables "map", it does not tell You anything about the data flows.
Thus, the other part is RE of the app - very complex ... hard work.

I used to use HORA to have a reverse DDL script of a schema, Sybase PowerDesigner for data models RE, and I tried CAST application mining suite for RE of Oracle Forms; I was content, but did only testing with it.
No idea how to do RE of other apps like PHP or C++ though ...

hth, Jan Received on Tue Aug 12 2003 - 10:02:01 CEST