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Message Posted: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 @ 23:45:18 GMT

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<-- Anonymously Posted: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 18:26 -->

I spent the last 12 years of my life generating millions of 'C++' and COBOL/DB2 lines of code directly from a CASE tool in the retail and health care industry. All done with point and click and I don't even know a lick of 'C' language! I presented at a 2003 conference and dazzled the people attending with the magic of generating a Client/server application directly from a data model and process hierarchy of diagrams containing business logic in generic Pseudo code that translated into C++, COBOL, and embedded SQL. That was not science fiction otherwise my paychecks would have never gone through the bank for a dozen years.

Today, my entire DW, which I modeled and manage, is generated directly from ERwin, including the PPI definitions, table views, and all Join Indexes!. Nothing (and that means NOTHING) gets into the Production database unless it is in the model, both 3NF and Dimensional Models. I can take the Erwin model and generate all the DDL for the entire DW and deploy it to another platform or share bits and pieces of it with other systems. We also use another CASE tool to perform ETL, and basically have no SPs or macros in use, other than my own macros I use for System Administration.

Blaming the vendors for getting stuck with a platform or software package is everyone's way, from the tech gurus to management, of diverting the blame and cover their incompetence to make decisions that help contribute to the greater good of the organization. Portable, reusable, simple and maintainable are attributes that most tech people I have encountered in my 20 year career ignore because they favor the attributes of efficiency, performance, compactness, and elegance (i.e. SPs, macros come to mind).

The biggest challenge I face in my current engagement is not the DW or Teradata, but changing people's attitude towards performing proper data and process modeling tasks, capturing metadata, applying naming standards, and choosing the proper place to build and store business logic (i.e., 4GL and CASE tools). Even our favorite vendor lacks in that area. Many here used to believe Data Models were a waste of time but that attitude is rapidly changing now that the DW is expanding its role. Nowadays, developers as well as management see how easy it is to learn the business and the rules that govern the business to the point some have communicated their desire to become Data Administrators, which to me is the ultimate compliment of how well I am doing my job.

I believe an organization becomes mature when they come to the realization that a database schema is only a nice "side effect" of building a data model. Those organizations that build data models to create database schemas have a lot to learn and are truly wasting their time (i.e., do not understand what they are doing), albeit making the CASE tool vendors a nice chunk of change.

Thanks,

Anonym

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