Re: Diffs between InfoModeler in IUS and ROM

bmaclean@worldnet.att.net wrote: ...snip - see his original post in this thread... Interesting. However my feeling is that ORM is a vast overkill for most RDBMS (or ORDBMS) modelling, but probably usefull for some areas of a large database. Most database design is so easy though, that I see no reason for simply creating the tables directly. Your description of Infomodeler's ability to do changes to the database is very interesting. May be you would be able to answer some questions (or someone else could): 1. When doing changes as you describe via a temporary table is there an option to also create extra SQL statements to fill new fields with calculated data? (By the way I do assume the table you describe as temporary realy is a regular table that just get's renamed after the original is droped?) 2. Sometimes a change is significant enough that using only SQL to fill in new fields is hard or impossible. Is there a built in language or possibly a way to use stored procedures to create data for new fields? The alternative of course is to write a separate program that does this, but that makes the upgrade just a little harder. One would also have to be able to have both the original and the new table in the database at the same time in many cases. 3. To me the drawing symbols and some other parts of IDEF1X aren't exactly the best there are. The ones used by the CASE Method (see http://www.essentialstrategies.com/publications/compare.html for a description) seems much better to me. Do you know if Infomodeler support these, or only plain IDEF1X? 4. Very important: When generating primary keys in Informix it's important to first do a create table. Then a create unique index. Then create the primary key via an alter table. There are several reasons for this. One is that you now have a named index that can be droped and recreated, you can spesify where it should be located (detached in another dbspace), the name doesn't start with a space that MS Access dislike so much and possibly other items. Do you know if Infomodeler supports this way of creating primary keys? I have found no other similar product that does it this way, and until I do find it I know of no better tool for database design than a simple editor to create the DML and MS Word for Windows to do the drawing. (Word is better than most drawing tools as it's so much simpler to maintain documentation in adition to the drawing.) 5. When creating tables one of the most important parts is documentation - free text that describes what the tables are, how they should be used and similarly for groups of columns and individual columns. If you look at products like ERWin and others they hide documentation deep inside the tool. It's hard to get at dialog boxes to see the documentation, there sometimes is no way to write documentation at the table level, there is never a way to do it for multiple columns, the size of the box they use for documentation is small, it's hard to print if at all possible - in short everything is wrong. After all the documentation at the database level is the key for every user, programmer as well as end users who create reports or otherwise access the database with general tools, to know what is in there and how it is all connected. Is Infomodeler any better? And I do not mean the ORM diagrams or the text that is used to creat them. I know those, and find them less then helpfull for large parts of the database. I mean free text that describe the things in the database and how they are used. I want to see this text optionally directly in the diagram, or by a simple click on a table with a spesial tool or some similar very simple way. Obviously I also need to be able to print the table definitions with all this freetext. I realy have no clue how people are able to survive without that. May be they don't and it's just mee who haven't seen how to do it with the different DB design tools? 6. A last item is how exten size/next size is handled. We continously create new tables at customer sites. We badly need a way to spesify the size of a set of key tables at that site, and have the other tables created with sizes relative to those tables. Is there some support for these things. From someone looking for things better than vi and MS Word. I am not asking only to make you that doesn't even work for Infomodeler answer questions they should properly answer. Another reason is to make others aware of some key issues related to DB design tools and perhaps get some input from others on good alternatives. On the original question of how the ROM tool from Informix handles all this I would say not at all. I have downloaded the latest version and wouldn't dream of touching it for creating any database. (Except if you simply use it as an editor for create table statements, and not the built in tool to create tables, but then what is the difference to a normal editor.) Some simple questions: Where do I put the documentation? How do I make it show some structure between tables - not only an alphabetic listing of them? These are only the first most elementary questions. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org