January 2, 2003 at 11:20 am
I was wondering what you use to document the database, business rules, security, ERD's, and DFD's.
Thanks
January 2, 2003 at 5:08 pm
My preference is Compiled Help Files. .chm
Just the fact that I can hyperlink dependencies makes it invaluable to me, and you should see the managers eyes bug out when you give them something they can jump right in and use immediately.
January 8, 2003 at 2:39 am
Do you have some way of generating "most" of the information in the .chm or just by typing it all in?
January 8, 2003 at 9:51 am
I've tried different products, ErWIN, ER/studio, Total SQL Analyzer, none of them work well.
In general, the target for internal apps moves too fast to properly document. Well perhaps not, but no one I have ever met enjoys doing it.
For documenting the database, I usually have a diagram in Visio that I reverse Engineer periodically for developers. Tend to hand update until I get too messy and then update it.
For business rules, I tend to document within the code. Since everything, tables, constraints, procs, etc is scripted, I do the comments there. Not a nice central place, but again, tough to do.
For software that is sold and released, I've found from dozens of vendors, that they don't have this documentation either. I can never get a good ER diagram or docs from them. They usually say that they don't want to release it, but after much persistance, they admit they don't have it.
This is one reason why keeping a stable staff is important. The internal knowledge is priceless and will always be more current than a written doc.
Steve Jones
January 9, 2003 at 8:31 am
I've been using ErWIN for a lot of years. It's better than it used to be and I especially like the ability to report to HTML which I then go in and pretty up a bit. Of course, I didn't have to pay for ErWIN. I've also used Sybase's product which I believe is called PowerDesigner. It is not as robust as ErWIN but was a good product. Of course, like many, I typically use these tools for initial db design and am pretty bad about keeping them up-to-date.
January 9, 2003 at 3:54 pm
I use VISIO. New Visio xp has some good feature for database. It is easy to us to define tables and will create DDL for you to create them.
I normally use it to draw ERD and DFD also.
Jie Ma
Jie Ma
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