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Message Posted: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 @ 11:52:20 GMT

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That's a good question. No easy answer, though. At least I am not aware of anything generic and practical.

Of course, we have all gone through UML, which at some point looked promising but somehow you don't see it that often on the real-world data warehousing / BI projects, and UML has never made it to the world of the "ETL tools". ETL tools were supposed to be much easier to use than C++ tools for which UML was primarily catering for.

Some ETL tools provide self-documenting diagrams, work flows, or graphs, or whatever they call them. That's all a tool user should need in terms of documentation. But other folks on the project often cannot use this because they have to pay license fee to even take a look at the tool's internal structures. Some tools would export the graphical objects into a read-only environment, and users can view them for less cash.

And then there are those Word documents, of course. Often neglected, outdated, and overall scary because they seem to have been written by folks who had no interest or competence in what they were doing.

BTW, the same problem exists with documentation of data models and BI structures and reports.

Yep. The only advise I can give is to pay that developer well so that he/she stays long enough on the project. Higher rate might correlate with the skill level, so that should also help the project.

Regards,

Victor

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