Not only interesting, but already in use as well.
I'm supporting an application that actually stores it's conceptual
level views in the actual application database (it has a simple
logical/conceptual data dictionary). It does this since 1992!
the only drawback is that the views are created in a conceptual
language that supports just a small subset of current SQL, and the
supporting data dictionary is somewhat primitive. Is this practical ?
You bet, i've never bothered with documenting the data
dictionary/conceptual datamodel, just writing reports against the data
dictionary suffices.
BTW the application also stores (almost) everything else in the
database as well: Userforms, code, configuration items etc. Except for
the application code, that is stored as BLOBs, everything has a simple
data model that you can query.
I tried to fix up the code BLOBs and reload it into our datawarehouse
with a simple data model instead. But this was too difficult to do
efficiently with SQL so I dropped that. Still, a queryable code model
would work very well, and would make code maintence a LOT easier, given
you've created some good reports on top of that.
Received on Mon Jun 13 2005 - 03:11:52 CDT
