December 27, 2001 at 12:07 am
Beyond sp_help 'tablename' - what do most people (mere mortals) use to create a quick written document describing the structure of a table for 'off-line' or design documentation purposes..?
Are there core tools that are necessary for a SQL admin -or- a DBA that are must haves?
Thanks!
December 27, 2001 at 6:17 am
Steve has a review posted on one such product:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/totalsqlanalyzer_1.asp
I'll probably be dis-dba'ed, but so far I don't own a tool to do this either. SP_help isnt bad. Might try combining it with a web task to generate some html output.
Andy
December 27, 2001 at 10:49 am
Thank you Andy for your thoughts.... Do many users employ Visio or ERWIN? Are there any clear winners here - or do DBA's just keep it in their heads...?
December 27, 2001 at 11:02 am
We have evaluated several different tools available on the market today and have found one that we truly like. The suite of products is from Embarcadero it includes ER/Studio, DBArtisan, and Rapid SQL. I have found that ER/Studio gives us the most flexibility of all the diagram products. although Erwin is not bad either. Visio 2002 is very very limited, it really doesn't do a DBA much good.
My advice is to go out there and download evals one at a time and find the one that truly suits your requirements.
I hope this doesn't sound too much like a commercial.
Rob DeMotsis
Sr. SQL Server DBA
December 27, 2001 at 11:49 am
We use Visio where I work pretty much because it's part of the MSDN Universal. I agree it is fairly limited. We did review ERWin and weren't very impressed... it's been a while since it's been updated. Now this is with regards to database diagrams.
If you're creating written documentation of table structures, you could use sp_help or something similar to give you the structure to copy into Word or what have you... what we usually end up doing for Change Control processes is scripting the database structures and storing that. It doesn't document what the columns are for and so we've built our own in-house data dictionaries for those purposes. Most of the data fields we have in SQL Server relate directly back to a system on the mainframe so it's important for us to store not only a description of what the column is, but also how it's calculated based on the mainframe field names. As a result, a custom solution was required for us.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
December 28, 2001 at 10:02 am
I used Visio currently. It works ok for the initial reverse engineering, but maintaining it is a manual process and it has flipped out with my groups, so I now need to recreate it from scratch. Unfortunately, we are a new db for our primary one and the schema changes monthly.
I've used ErWin many years ago, and I liked it, but it was cumbersome. Of course, it was also many US$$$$$. Haven't seen it in over 3 years, but many DBAs like it, perhaps because there is not much else.
I used ERStudio at my last job and liked it. However, less $$ than ErWin, but still $$. Personally, the big thing I was missing was a good data dictionary that allowed ood comments on all tables and columns.
I'd try a few out and see. We'd love to here what you think.
Steve Jones
Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply