The S-Designor Professional and Enterprise editions empower you to simply and quickly reverse engineer over thirty databases including Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres, Watcom, DB2, AS/400, SQL Server, SQLBase, Progress, Access, Paradox, and FoxPro.
Reverse-Engineering lets you:
Reverse engineering an existing database generates a graphical representation of the database structure, a physical data model, which proves useful for a variety of tasks.
To do so, S-Designor reads the database structure directly through ODBC drivers. If necessary, S-Designor uses the database creation script (DDL) that may be reconstructed through utilities provided by S-Designor or the DBMS.
In this way S-Designor interprets characteristics specific to each DBMS. It builds the physical data model complete with tables, columns, indexes, references, triggers, stored procedures, and tablespaces.
The conceptual data model is extremely useful for non-technical presentation since it shows a logical picture of the database structure without any specific physical considerations. S-Designor can automatically generate a conceptual data model from the constructed physical data model.
During conceptual data model generation, S-Designor applies rigorous translation rules which transform every table into an entity or a relationship depending on key migration analysis in the physical model.
S-Designor's reverse engineering functionalities allow you to create and update complete analysis documentation.
At each step of the reverse-engineering process, the models and each modeling object may be documented and annotated. Then S-Designor's powerful documentation editor generates detailed analysis reports.
All documentation is presentation-quality and easily customizable, complete with graphical models, header, footer, etc. At the same time, you can export the reports to file formats for Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, and AmiPro.
When an application increases in size or becomes obsolete, it may become necessary to migrate the data from one DBMS to another. S-Designor's reverse engineering capabilities migrate your database at the touch of a button. After analyzing the data structure, S-Designor allows you to select another target DBMS and generate the new database structure.
Data models constructed through reverse engineering can also serve as a starting point for a new version of an application. Once structure modifications are applied to the data model, S-Designor compares the reference and the new versions. Modifications are implemented directly via ODBC or using the alter commands script (DDL). In this way, the database structure is modified while preserving the contained data.