Probably the single most painful task in data modeling (or any modeling for that matter) is switching tools. Forget the high direct costs like purchasing licenses and the obvious indirect costs of retraining your staff, because it’s the migration of all your meta-data from one tool to the other that looms large on the horizon of pain. I’ve even witnessed people who will remain on an unsupported tool by a defunct vendor rather...

You’ll have to forgive me for spoofing the famous movie line “We don’t need no stinking badges” (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948 and Blazing Saddles, 1974), it just seemed quite apropos J



I was discussing data modeling needs recently with a potential customer – and like many shops I visit, they saw no need for data modeling. They believed that their DBAs, data administrators and application architects knew...

In this installment I thought I'd write about the exciting, and soon to debut, Toad Data Modeler 3.0 release rather than yet another boring academic or technical topic on data modeling. TDM 3.0 is quite exciting. While it has not yet been made available for public beta – it will be very soon (so please email the product manager John.Pocknell@Quest.com to get signed up). And once...

Over the decades I’ve worked with many data modelers – and I’ve learned something key to building a great model that is not always intuitively obvious: spend at least 50% of your data modeling time on the relationships. Often modelers are so overly concerned with the entities, attributes and unique identifiers or keys they don’t allocate enough time for the proper questioning, construction and review of relationships. Therefore,...

Probably one of the most often discussed and hotly debated topics in both data modeling and database design is that of normalization. Many database designers, architects, DBAs and senior developers have differing positions and/or beliefs on the topic. However quite unfortunately, they often are not communicating with optimal effectiveness due to some fundamental differences in terminology and understanding. The simple solution...

Last month I wrote about “Why Reverse Engineering is Always Worthwhile.” So the logical next issue to examine is forward engineering – its different approaches and its many comparative benefits. The best way to do this is via an analogical example J

I live in Dallas-Fort Worth. Let’s assume that I drove down to Austin at the start of the this year’s college football season to watch my #1 Ohio State Buckeyes play against...

In many shops that I visit, neither the DBA’s nor the database developers place much value on performing data modeling. Often there are seemingly sound reasons for this exclusion: the historically high price of data modeling tools, data models are not required as a project milestone or deliverable, and quite often the database was simply either inherited or supports a third party application – and thus is not open for modification....