S-Designor Professional delivers. Coupling unmatched ease-of-use and a sensible bi-level design process, you can quickly organize logical concepts and then translate them into high quality databases. All the power is at your disposal to define, generate and manage your database's physical properties. Along the way, document each step with S-Designor's 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 you on the right track. So you concentrate on creating the best logical design for your database while S-Designor takes care of implementation details. By bridging the gap with your 4GL tool, S-Designor speeds application development while ensuring client/server data integrity.
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 where they belong, in the physical level.
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. ò 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 make-up of your application, for example, cardinality of relationships. You can let S-Designor take care of the physical translation. ò 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. ò 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 you want. 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 and their relationships. ò 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.). ò In the PDM, you can enrich and optimize tables, references, integrity rules and indexes. òS-Designor's translation can handle all the standard logical descriptions, including dependent and many-to-many relationships. Data types are generated for your specific DBMS. ò At the same time, S-Designor monitors your design models to check their validity. ò 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 125+ pages of design space, you handle large design models through convenient sub-models. ò 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. ò 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.
The Smart Choice for Over 30 Databases
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 Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres, SQL Server, Watcom, Progress, DB2, SQLBase, AS/400, Paradox, Access, and FoxPro.
From the design models, S-Designor Professional 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. ò Then you can retro-document existing databases quickly to streamline communication. ò 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.
Speed Application Development
For maximum client/server performance, S-Designor Professional fully bridges with PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, Progress, Uniface, Omnis 7 and other leading 4GL tools. ò 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 re-use in a new application. ò And to speed application development further, S-Designor Professional will even generate default screens for PowerBuilder and SQLWindows.
Detailed Analysis Reports
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.).
Unmatched Ease-of-Use
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.
The S-Designor Series
Thousands of people worldwide rely on the tools from the S-Designor Series to increase design integrity and database performance. òS-Designor Professional includes robust features like the sub-models, the customizable trigger editor and the 4GL tool bridge for projects with one to two designers. ò And for workgroups, S-Designor Enterprise gives your team the power of a centralized and secure SQL project dictionary.
To purchase S-Designor Professional or to learn more about the S-Designor Series, call (800) SDP 9220 Minimum System Requirements ò PC386 ò MS Windows 3.x or Windows NT ò 4MB RAM ò 4MB hard disk space