DB-MAIN 9.1.4

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Date updated

July 1, 2011

Developer

REVER S A | (more products)

All time downloads

1,499

License

Free

Platform

Windows

Our rating

5 / 5

User ratings

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Description of DB-MAIN 9.1.4

A data-modeling and data-architecture tool

DB-MAIN is a data-modeling and data-architecture tool. It is designed to help developers and analysts in most data engineering processes, including
- Design processes: requirement analysis, conceptual design, normalisation, schema integration, logical design, physical design, schema optimisation, code generation.
- Transformations: schema transformation, model transformation, ETL.
- Reverse engineering and program understanding: schema analysis (COBOL, CODASYL, IMS, IDMS, SQL, XML, ...), code analysis, data and data flow reverse engineering.
- Maintenance, evolution and integration: database migration, database evolution, impact analysis, database integration and federation, data wrapper design and generation.
- And many other domains like temporal and active databases, datawarehouse, XML engineering, ...

DB-MAIN also includes meta-modeling components that allow its users to develop new functions and extend its repository.

Editor's review for DB-MAIN

Building a simple database with only two or three tables is not that difficult. Adding a table or two according to the needs of the program being developed is also quite easy. Unfortunately, this incremental approach often results in an awkward database structure that eventually proves unable to adapt to the evolving requirements of the program, and most likely poor database performance.

Starting a database from scratch is a rare occurrence. More often, you will be extending an existing database, perhaps adding just a few extra fields to an existing table or adding new tables and you need to know how the existing tables cross reference each other. As databases and programs grow, it may be necessary to change from, let’s say, a Microsoft Access database to something more substantial such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. If the existing database is not fully documented with table and field names, relationships (cross references) and usage of each table and field fully documented can be a daunting task.

This is where a specialist tool such as DB-Main can save the day. DB-Main is a data-modeling and data-architecture tool from the University of Namur built on more than 15 years of scientific research. It is designed to help database analysts and developers perform the most common data engineering processes.
For new databases, it supports the main design processes of requirements analysis, conceptual database design, logical design, schema normalization and optimization, schema integration, physical design, and code generation.

If you have an existing database but there is little or no documentation regarding its internal machinations, DB-Main can perform reverse engineering and program understanding. Its capabilities include code analysis, schema analysis, data analysis and data flow reverse engineering.

Maintenance, evolution (adding tables, fields etc) and integration of the database is fully catered for with DB-Main's database evolution, database migration, impact analysis, database integration and data wrapper design and generation features. In addition, there is no restriction on the maximum size of projects that can be saved. DB-Main also maintains an extended project history view to keep a record of how the database has evolved over time. For a more human-readable documentation, DB-Main can generate extended Entity Relationship (ER) schemes, Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams, UML activity diagrams, and UML use case diagrams.

Using its SQL and ODBC database extraction features, DB-Main can analyze an existing database, identify its underlying structure and relationships then generate the code to migrate an existing database in Standard SQL (SQL92), Microsoft Access, MySQL, PostgreSQL syntax and more.

DB-Main is available free of charge for both Microsoft Windows and Linux so if you are a database analyst or developer, do not miss out on this must-have!