Data-Oriented Design

Automated Support Tools for Data-Oriented Design

Many CASE tools support aspects of data oriented design (see Table 10-7). Two specifically support IE as discussed in this chapter. The IE CASE tools are Information Engineering Workbench4 (lEW) by Knowledgeware, Inc., an4 Information Engineering Facility (lEF) by Texas Instruments, Inc. Both products receive high marks of approval and satisfaction from the user communities. Because of their cost, both products are used by mostly large companies. The products offer enterprise analysis in addition to application analysis, design, and construction (i.e., coding). Both IEF and lEW work on PCs, networks, and mainframes. 

A typical IEF installation could include a mainframe version with the centralized repository. Users check out portions of a repository to work with on a PC. Then, when the work is complete and checked on the PC, it is merged with the mainframe repository for official storage. When the merge takes place, the checked-out items are revalidated for consistency with all mainframe repository definitions. Both products offer automatic SQL schema generation for data. IEF offers automatic code generation for Cobol with embedded SQL, and can interface to generators for other languages.

TABLE 10-6 Installation Plan Items

lEW and IEF differ in important ways. lEW is more flexible in that it does not require the completion of any matrices or diagrams. However, to take advantage of the interdiagram evaluation software that assesses completeness and syntactic consistency, all matrices and diagrams are required during a given phase. This means that you might not have the diagrams or analyses from planning, but you still can create levels of ERDs within the analysis tool. Similarly, you might not have the analysis tool, so action diagrams can be created directly within the design tool. IEF's strength is that its rigorous adherence to Information Engineering has led to substantive intelligence checking within the software. Both tools easily manage and sort large matrices that result from several of the analyses. 

The weakness of the tools differs for each tool. lEW is primarily a PC-based product that can be unstable when used for large projects. lEW also provides DFDs, not PDFDs, and is not a pure data methodology tool. A strength of lEW is that Knowledgeware was an IBM partner in its repository definition; as a result, lEW is compatible with AD-cycle software from IBM.

IEF's strength is also its biggest weakness. IEF requires completion of every table, matrix, and diagram at this time. 5 The level of intelligent checking that can be performed is higher than with most other CASE products, but the requirement to complete every table, and so on does not make sense for all projects. TI has recognized the severity of this shortcoming and is increasing the flexibility of the product without compromising its capabilities. The mainframe version of IEF uses DB/2 for repository management and can generate C, Cobol, DB/2, SQL, and other languages' codes.

Table 10-7 Automated Tool Support for Data-Oriented Methodologies