Hi Drew, Am Donnerstag, den 31.01.2008, 01:43 -0500 schrieb Drew Jensen: [...] > The first step of course is to turn the UML diagram into an actual > physical schema - and - therein is the question.
May I ask: what tool do you (and others, if so) use for making UML diagrams for use with OO.o base? I'd really like to have a design tool coupled tightly to base ... > Back in the good old days we had some real constrains on names, table > names, column names and the like. Some most likely remember the old 8 > character limits imposed by some early RDBMS, even the big name ones. > But those days are long gone > > Many of us are use to the idea of a virtual data model and a physical > data model - meat and potatoes, if you will, of the DBA and data > modeler. But DBAs and data modelers are not the expected users of the > Base application in general and certainly not the target reader of a mid > level tutorial. Others of us are experienced database application > developers ( business applications in other words ) and are used to data > dictionaries, one use of which is to help map those often near cryptic > physical column names back to the descriptive name used when the virtual > ( business level ) design was done. > > ( as an aside - who has actually gone ahead and written that script to > produce a data dictionary from a hsqldb Base database...come on you know > we've all been meaning to get to it sooner or later - who wants to > share? ;> ) You hit a spot attracting my attention here. I did a small design with some tables and a form for QM recently. That one does have low priority, so I followed my habit of documenting what I am doing on the go. In this case all the tables columns have more or less verbose remarks filled in when creating tables using the table design window. Nice, if I'm back on that in some weeks I'll understand immediately what I've been doing (I hope ;). My idea or wish here was: Could these remarks explaning the columns meanings be used to a) copy them to the to the yellow "tips" help windows appearing when the mouse stays on the column (or at least the column header) in a form showing this fields? b) extract them to a report forming a data dictionary? Maybe somebody can throw in some service and interface names, if this is already possible? > OK - all that is to get this. Looking at the conceptual design reflected > in the UML diagram I see lots of quite descriptive column names. I can > do the normal, and comfortable, step of changing these to something less > so - or - and this is where I am leaning, leaving them just as they are. > Long, multi word phrases and verbose. I personally like long descriptive names, but technically spoken this is called "asking for problems". I'm sure many databases do not handle spaces in table names well, and if they'd do many ODBC-, JDBC- and whatever drivers will fail to operate on those names. [...] > But - do any of you think that is a bad thing for a tutorial to show - > should a tutorial instead stick to look up tables for this type of thing? > > Anyway - if you read along this far - thanks for your time - and thanks > for comments you might want to toss my way on any of this - think of it > as 'Best practices'. What would you NOT want to be showing users or > conversely what would you think particularly important to pass along. See above, do not teach users bad habits that'll fall on their feet in short time. Marc --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
