Re: Reverse engineering of database definitions

From: Reinhold Broeker <reinhold_at_pop-frankfurt.com>
Date: 1995/08/09
Message-ID: <40b27n$71r_at_news.B-1.de.Contrib.Net>#1/1


Darryl Snedeker x52168 <dsnedeke> wrote:

>I agree with Eric's remarks regarding the S-Designor tool as I have evaluated
>this tool as well. However, this tool has some shortcomings. As a DBA or
>developer, having knowledge of all indexes for all tables is what I consider
>absolutely necessary. The S-Designor tool does not allow for the pictorial
>representation of secondary (non-pk, non-fk) indexes. Now you have this
>wonderful tool, but you still must reference the data dictionary for this
>information. In my environment, this is impractical. I have articulated this
>shortcoming as well as others to the S-Designor folks. There are very
>responsive but, could not indicate if such a change could/would ever occur.
>If representing cardinality on the Physical model is important to you, you will
>be disappointed in this regard as well.
 

>Now that I'm done slamming, I would like to recommend an alternative, but I
>cannot as I have not found any vendor tool capable of facilitating a pictorial
>representation of secondary indexes in the format of my preference. Now while
>ERWIN will pictorially display secondary indexes, you must be prepared to
>re-educate your customers and developers. The ERWIN product uses the IDEF1X
>standard and is quite different from the crows-feet & crosses we've all become
>too familiar with. The IDEF1X standard is excellent and I think it quite
>possiblyis the best. I would utilize it if I weren't faced with answering
>IDEF1X questions from the 600+ customers I have.
 

>There is Light.
>A vendor did make contact with me regarding prior remarks I submitted to the
>net several days ago. I would share their name, but I'm not in a position
>where I want to blindly endorse a software vendor because they said their
>software can levitate monitors. I will followup though with any interested
>parties on the findings of my evaluation. Email, of course.
 

>Good Luck
>--
>Darryl Snedeker ph# (512) 602-2168
>Senior Database Administrator fax (512) 602-5018
>Advanced Micro Devices Austin, Texas

Regarding the shortcomings of S-Designor I may add that the names of primary/foreign key constraints are not preserved but generated by S-Designor during reverse engineering (of DDL script, not sure about direct database access via ODBC).
That was a K.O. criterion in a recent project where we used DB2-DDL (generated by a mainframe-based data dictionary) for an ORACLE database. We had to preserve the DD/DB2 object names (or invent similar names for primary key constraints f.i.).

Reinhold

---
Reinhold Broeker
Frankfurt, Germany
reinhold_at_pop-frankfurt.com
Received on Wed Aug 09 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST

Original text of this message