V15 - Database Builder tracking live DB

[Paolo F Cantoni]

The Database Builder is supposed to be able to track the changes to the live DB and maintain a synchronised model (See: Database Compare).

Has anybody used this functionality "in anger"?  As noted in some previous posts, we've reverse-engineered our Data Warehouse and now it's evolved and we're ready to update our model.

Any gotchas or tips would be much appreciated.

TIA,
Paolo

[Geert Bellekens]

Yes, we have used this in the past with success.
You can do a full "load" or choose for each difference what to do with it.
In our case we always do a full load as the database is our master, and we only want to have it in EA to map it to our logical model.

Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Yes, we have used this in the past with success.
You can do a full "load" or choose for each difference what to do with it.
In our case, we always do a full load as the database is our master, and we only want to have it in EA to map it to our logical model.

Geert

Thanks, Geert,

At this stage, our use case is the same.  Eventually, we hope to push to the live DW.

Paolo

PS: If we wanted to test round-tripping, we should be able to push the model to a test instance and then do a DB compare to see if anything broke.  Have you done such tests?

[Geert Bellekens]

PS: If we wanted to test round-tripping, we should be able to push the model to a test instance and then do a DB compare to see if anything broke.  Have you done such tests?

No, not really.
I have one client who uses it for forward engineering, but they don't use the compare feature. (they use a add-in I wrote to transform their logical model into a database model. The comparison is done before the transform by this add-in)
They also simply generate the DDL and have a separate tool that generates an update script based on new and previous DDL.

Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

PS: If we wanted to test round-tripping, we should be able to push the model to a test instance and then do a DB compare to see if anything broke.  Have you done such tests?

No, not really.
I have one client who uses it for forward engineering, but they don't use the compare feature. (they use an add-in I wrote to transform their logical model into a database model. The comparison is done before the transform by this add-in)
They also simply generate the DDL and have a separate tool that generates an update script based on new and previous DDL.

Geert

Thanks for the heads-up, Geert

We'll see what happens.

Paolo