Thanks Paolo & David -
I thought indeed about generating an "empty" schema database & reverse engineering from that - it just seems like an unnecessary step, & all case tools from way back did this - even Visio (ugh!). Besides, with 3000 tables, it's not trivial, and since it's mainframe DB2 I need to involve DBA's, which increases time & $$... i.e., a pain, lag, & expense - what we're all trying to avoid with agile methods.
Another capability I'm going to be testing soon (to your point David) is the ability to reverse engineer selected tables, then MERGE them into an existing database model, choosing what to keep & what not to keep - ERwin does this very, very well, and while I don't expect perfection in this area from EA, this capabiliity has saved tons and tons of time, and has made it possible to be much more responsive to projects.
Here's yet another thing I'd like to do - maybe i should start a new thread -
Before we got UML going, I used ERwin logical models to do domain object modeling - i.e., where the boxes are business things representing business vocabulary, and may not develop into tables at all - they can be used to develop tables, but they're primarily for communication & getting people on the same page. I have over 800 objects, & had been thinking if I could generate a database - even Access would do in this case - I could reverse engineer it into tables..
BUT THEN - what I really need is to transform that model from a database model to a domain object model! I'm very impressed with EA's ability to go in the other direction - i.e. from domain objects to tables -
