Database Generation

After describing the database's general framework with a conceptual design, S-Designor's powerful features let you generate, optimize, and modify the physical design. From there, S-Designor can create and maintain the structure for practically any DBMS on the market:

• Create tables, columns, indexes, declarative constraints, views and physical storage options
• Define and implement referential integrity either through declarative constraints or with triggers
• Customize and manage triggers and stored procedures for all your design models, individual models or tables
• Perform maintenance modifications for existing databases while preserving contained data

Physical Data Model

Generation

The final step of the database creation process begins with the generation of a Physical Data Model (PDM) from a Conceptual Data Model (CDM). Upon initiating PDM generation, select your target DBMS. S-Designor's powerful parameterization system handles the characteristics, such as data types, for practically any DBMS.

The automatically generated PDM contains tables; columns and their constraints (minimum and maximum values, list of values, etc.) and indexes.

Enhance & Implement the Physical Data Model

Upon completion of the PDM, the database can be generated either directly through ODBC drivers or using a DDL script.

The generation includes tables (and all associated constraints), indexes, views, triggers, and stored procedures. S-Designor's flexible generation options let you select the specific type of generation (suppression and creation of tables, suppression and creation of indexes, constraints' existence, comments, etc.) as well as select specific tables to generate.

Triggers & Stored Procedures

Management of all your triggers and stored procedures can be handled by S-Designor's extensive trigger editor to ensure data integrity. S-Designor automatically generates referential integrity triggers from the database structure using standard trigger templates or user-defined templates.

The pre-defined optimized trigger templates may be customized for all models or a specific model. You can even modify the trigger code for a specific table. In addition, S-Designor manages your stored procedures for convenient code reusability. With a powerful trigger and stored procedure definition format that is easy to consult, S-Designor generates thousands of lines of code, dramatically increasing your productivity. Virtually every DBMS that implements triggers and stored procedures is supported, including Oracle, Sybase System 10, SQL Server 4.2, Ingres 6, Informix 5, RDB, Watcom 4, SQLBase 6 and InterBase 4.

Database Maintenance

During the entire lifecycle of your application, S-Designor handles database modifications, taking into account the impact of structure modifications on an installed database to preserve contained data.

You start the process by archiving the model of a stabilized or production version. To update the database to a new version, S-Designor compares the archived and the new versions and produces corresponding alteration commands which can either be implemented directly via ODBC or using a DDL script.

You can choose the type of orders and the list of concerned tables. Depending on the nature of the modification, S-Designor chooses between a simple "alter table" order or a succession of more complex orders (renaming the old table, creation of a new table and data recuperation or suppression of the old table).