Thousands of users worldwide already enjoy the power of S-Designor modeling tools to easily design, create, reverse engineer, document and maintain their databases in a client/server environment. But now, large project designers are ready to move to the next level - team database design. A robust workgroup modeling tool is what you need.
S-Designor Enterprise commands all the power and flexibility you've come to expect in Designor modeling tools - plus centralized and secure data! With unmatched ease-of-use and the sensible bi-level design process, your team can quickly organize logical concepts and then translate them into high quality databases. Define, generate and manage all your database's physical properties. Along the way, document each step with presentation-quality analysis reports. To complete the loop with development, S-Designor interfaces with your choice of client/server 4GL tools.
With S-Designor's intuitive interface, you design quickly and easily. And the organization of bi-level design keeps your whole team on the right track. So you concentrate on creating the best logical design for your database while S-Designor takes care of implementation details. And thanks to its central dictionary, you can rest easy since S-Designor Enterprise manages complete data security throughout your team's design process.
S-Designor allows abstraction of design into two separate and distinct levels through the Information Engineering methodology. In essence, it simply gives you the required organization to keep logic in the conceptual level and physical considerations in the physical level where they belong.
Why Use a Bi-Level Design?
This bi-level structure plays a key role in every aspect of database design. With it, you avoid confusion in design, saving countless hours of rework. The conceptual level is extremely useful for business presentation because it allows intuitive, nontechnical description of your application's logic. Here, you only need to consider the logical makeup of your application, for example, cardinality of relationships. You can let S-Designor take care of the physical translation. Keeping things organized from the start with separate levels helps not only on your original design, but when maintenance becomes necessary as well. You will already have things logically arranged so there's no need to go back and figure everything out again. Furthermore, this method proves particularly useful when more than one DBMS is involved. For example, from a single conceptual design, S-Designor can generate a database structure for Oracle, Sybase, Access or practically any other database. Or in a distributed database, you can generate different parts of your model to each different DBMS.
How Does Bi-Level Design Work?
To unlock the power of S-Designor, just open its friendly Windows interface and describe the application's requirements in a Conceptual Data Model (CDM) of business entities, their relationships with one another and the business rules that define and constrain them. From the CDM, S-Designor automatically generates a separate graphical representation of the database structure for your specific DBMS - a Physical Data Model (PDM). All your logical descriptions automatically translate (entities become tables, attributes become columns, etc.). In the PDM, you can enrich and optimize tables, references, integrity rules and indexes. S-Designor translates all the standard logical descriptions, including dependent and many-to-many relationships into the appropriate physical structures. Data types are generated for your specific DBMS. At the same time, S-Designor monitors your design models to check their validity.
Throughout your application's entire lifecycle, this bi-level design method, plus detailed analysis reports, guarantee superior database design and error-free maintenance.
Handling Complex Designs
No matter your project's size, S-Designor's powerful features put you in control. Which means with 165 pages of design space, you handle large design models through convenient sub-models. The Sub-Model Editor allows you to easily work with a large design model in a smaller domain while maintaining definition unity. Anything done at the sub-model level is reflected in the global model and vice-versa. To simplify model representation when an object has multiple interwoven relationships, graphical synonyms can be used to represent the same object more than once throughout the model.
Information Sharing
Team data sharing relies on the concepts of sub-models and consolidation, which may be accomplished at both conceptual and physical levels. The notion of sub-models as described above is taken one step further; the sub-model is each designer's domain of access rights. After first extracting a copy of the model from the dictionary, the designer may make modifications within his sub-model domain. In order for others to take advantage of those modifications, the model must be consolidated back into the dictionary. Depending on the organization, consolidation may be accomplished by each designer or exclusively managed by a project leader or administrator. This flexibility allows you to choose the work mode that best suits your needs.
Sub-Model Security
Each sub-model owner can grant rights for public access (all other designers can alter sub-model objects) or private access (only the owner and the administrator can modify sub-model objects). Therefore, only authorized designers will be allowed to modify dictionary objects.
Model Extraction and Consolidation
Designers extract a copy of the model from the dictionary, and they can work on this copy locally, even on a laptop! After working within their domain of responsibility, they consolidate the changes in the dictionary. During consolidation, only sub-models for which the designer has update rights will be modified, ensuring data security. To guarantee complete data sharing, the model automatically receives modifications from other designers upon consolidation into the dictionary.
To offer a wide range of flexibility, objects common to several sub-models may be modified by each overlapping sub-model owner. During consolidation, S-Designor Enterprise issues a warning in case of update conflicts and reports on differences between the sub-models. For example, upon dictionary object modification, S-Designor notifies the designer if changes were made by another designer since the last extraction and displays those differences. He then has access to the object's definition in the dictionary and can choose to keep it, overwrite it or stop the consolidation.
Model Management
There's no more wondering about how some changes will effect your overall design. S-Designor Enterprise lets you save several versions of the model in the dictionary, compare the versions and generate a complete report of their differences.
User Management
Management of user access rights is reserved for S-Designor Enterprise's dictionary administrator. Each user possesses a profile which defines his rights:
This profile, combined with sub-model security, guarantees data access security.
The Central Dictionary
Located on a DBMS, the central dictionary is accessible through SQL queries, giving great freedom in data manipulation and reporting. The dictionary may be implemented in a variety of ways:
Whether you want to create, reverse engineer, maintain, or retarget your database, S-Designor is the smart choice. And S-Designor does it right for over thirty databases including Sybase, Oracle, Informix, Ingres, SQL Server, Watcom, Progress, DB2, AS/400, SQLBase, Paradox, Access and FoxPro.
From the design models, S-Designor Enterprise automatically creates and maintains the optimal database structure, directly through ODBC drivers or using DDL scripts, including customizable options for:
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.
Even if you didn't originally design your database in S-Designor, you can still take advantage of all its powerful features. Reverse-Engineering lets you "x-ray" your existing database so you can visualize and reorganize its structure graphically. Then you can retro-document existing databases quickly to streamline communication.
Plus you can upgrade or migrate your database to a different DBMS at the touch of a button. At last, you have the capability to standardize and organize your database designs efficiently with a proven methodology.
For maximum client/server performance, S-Designor Enterprise fully bridges with PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, Progress, Uniface, Omnis 7 and other leading 4GL tools. Include your extended attributes like edit styles, validation rules and format masks along with your database structure design, and export it all to your 4GL tool. Or import those extended attributes from PowerBuilder or SQLWindows for reuse in a new application. And to speed application development further, S-Designor Enterprise will even generate default screens for PowerBuilder and SQLWindows.
To streamline communication, S-Designor generates presentation-quality analysis reports that can also be exported to your favorite word processor, including Word for Windows, WordPerfect, PageMaker and AmiPro. All your critical data modeling information at both the conceptual and physical levels can be included in a single comprehensive report. Plus you have the option to customize either the layout (header, footer, etc.) or the contents (tables, columns, etc.).
Along the way, S-Designor's eye-popping user interface facilitates unsurpassed presentation and organization. Intuitive editors manage your every move while pop-up menus let you find the option you want in an instant. Have a question? The context sensitive on-line help awaits at your fingertips. Choose from an infinite array of colors to highlight your design. Zoom in for the smallest details or all the way out and capture the global picture. Organize your model at a touch of the button with alignment options. With the handy toolbox, you can add freeform graphics to illustrate further ideas. With S-Designor, it's a snap.
Thousands of people worldwide rely on the tools from the S-Designor Series to increase design integrity and database performance.
S-Designor Professional includes robust features like sub-models, the customizable trigger editor and the 4GL tool bridge for projects with one to two designers. And for workgroups, S-Designor Enterprise gives your team the power of a centralized and secure SQL project dictionary.
To purchase S-Designor Enterprise or to learn more about the S-Designor Series, call (800) SDP 9220
Minimum System Requirements
Client: PC386 MS Windows 3.x or Windows NT Minimum 4MB RAM, 8MB recommended 10MB hard disk space
Server: specifications vary, contact your sales representative for further details
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