Re: [GeneX-dev] Re: ERWin File on website

[Todd F. P. <tf...@nc...>]

Y'all, I have a Java application which currently reverse-engineers a
Sybase database into an Oracle database. I don't think it would be much
trouble to generalize this a bit to do Postgres to Oracle or whatever to
whatever. The utility is pretty basic right now...only does tables, views,
some constraints and some permissions. But, it has proved useful as a 'get
started' utility for reverse endgineering of database structure.

Have been meaning to work on it more. Will provide a prototype soon.

Todd

P.S. DDL = data definition language (create table, etc.)

On 29 Nov 2001, Jason E. Stewart wrote:

> "Hilmar Lapp" <la...@gn...> writes:
> 
> > Quoting "Jason E. Stewart" <ja...@op...>:
> > 
> > > 
> > > All the DB interfaces are created to be SQL generic. Instead of having
> > > a bunch of hard-coded SQL ('SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE baz="NAN"') I
> > > created an SQL abstraction layer using three functions
> > > create_select_sql(), create_insert_sql(), and
> > > create_update_sql(). With these you can plug in backends for any
> > > relational DB to produce the SQL you need. 
> > > 
> > 
> > Is this framework already available already? If so, from the GeneX repository
> > or MAGEstk?
> 
> So all of the create_* functions are all in Genex-1.x, the piece that
> isn't there is the XML based schema description.
> 
> > I'm trying to reverse engineer the ERD, unsuccessful so far. ERwin would
> > not reverse engineer from SQL, and doesn't have an idea about Postgres.
> > My next idea was port to Oracle, and reverse engineer with Designer.
> 
> One of the reasons I detested ERWin.
> 
> > Can the tool framework you mentioned reverse engineer from SQL DDL?
> 
> It's an API for helping applications build DBMS-independent queries, I
> have no idea if it would be of any use for reverse engineering. I'm
> actually hoping to replace the system I wrote with some of the
> existing CPAN modules that do very similar things,
> e.g. SQL::QueryBuilder::Simple. 
> 
> > BTW the DDL I was able to dump did not contain FK constraints (bad
> > for reverse engineering). Was I missing something, or does the
> > schema not contain FK constraints? (If the latter, was this a design
> > decision?)
> 
> Sorry, DDL = ???
> 
> That is one of the irritating consequences of the incident I mentioned
> the other day. When management of the DB and schema were taken over by
> another individual, he began using pg_dump instead of maintaining the
> table definition scripts. Well, GeneX was originally built on
> Postgres-6.5, which didn't support foreign key constraints. By the
> time we switched to Postgres-7.x which does, it was too late. The
> current DB dump had thrown out all the FK constraints :-(
> 
> The good news is that in Genex-2.x, they are all back. As well as a
> number of other useful constraints for column uniqueness that makes it
> a lot easier to check if a given piece of data, e.g. an array design,
> is already in the DB or not. This proved very useful for controlling
> the insertion and updating of data.
> 
> jas.
> 
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