[Tutor] "Object designer" applications - are there any?

[Flynn, Stephen (L & P - IT)]

I'm about to embark on a project in Python (primarily in order to learn the language and equally importantly, to make my life easier at work).

I'm an IBM MVS Operations Analyst by trade by recently I've been spending more and more time working on Data Migrations; legacy systems in VSAM files, ADABAS, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and most recently we're about to start off on Tandem, which should be interesting!

Anyway, nearly all of this work, at some point, involves me reading a Data Dictionary for the source system and converting it to an Oracle table definition. More often than not this DDL is in text form and I convert it to Oracle DDL such as

Create Table wibble
( clientref    NUMBER(10) not null,
  bthdte    NUMBER(5) not null,
  natinr_no VARCHAR2(16) not null,
etc
)

It struck me that if I write a "read in Sybase DDL and spit out Oracle DDL" routine and so forth, I'd get a lot of reuse out of it. However, I've not done much OOP at all and consequently, my object design skills are somewhat non-existent. Whilst I have a rough idea of what my properties my "table" object will have I was looking for something to help me design it - something which I can say "this is a table object, it has a name and multiple columns. Columns have a type, a width (which may be further comprised of scale and precision or just an integer depending on the column type) and a "nullable" flag.). Oh, and there may be multiple columns... so maybe a column should be an object too... etc.

Anyone know if there are any such kinds of programs out there already (freeware please - I'll be doing this off my own back so funds are tight for commercial software). Failing that, does anyone use something for this kind of thing already, Visio maybe or a spreadsheet. Maybe just notepad or a post-it?

Perhaps most people just design their objects on paper and let the code do the documentation for them... I don't know as I've never done this before.

It doesn't strike me as being a complicated project at first glance - all it's doing is translating structured DDL into structured Oracle DDL, but I'd like to get my first principles correct so that I don't end up 3 weeks in and realise I've made a fundament design flaw ("Crap - I didn't think of anything to describe table indexes" or "Hmm - views.... is a "view" just another "table" or should I describe a view in the SQL it'll actually use, so it's just a piece of text.... and how does that translate to a materialized view" and so forth...) and have to re-do chunks... or maybe I do  want to do that, to make sure I get my design nailed before a line of code is ground out.


I'm open to suggestions on what useful tools are out there to make my learning experience easier, more pleasant and satisfying - if that involves the back of fag packets, so be it. :)


-- 
Steve Flynn
Technical Architect
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