Agile Schema Management with Model Doc

Most software developed to work with relational databases, and more recently, with NoSQL databases, uses some type of mapping layer to retrieve and persist data between the application layer and the database. For us, this raised the question of how to define the object model and the database schema together, so that one implied the other, and could be used to generate the software artifacts that bind the application to the database.

To achieve this capability we defined a schema for describing an object model, and a set of canonical transformations from the object model to the database model. Then we write the code to support these transformations, i.e. to generate DDL, upgrade scripts and method and procedure signatures along with baseline implementation for basic crud operations. In this session I will explain how this all came to be, how it works, and what benefits have accrued, which will include:

The objectives for the model doc processor
Describing our meta model
Describe the mapping from the model to the physical tables
Show how the model handles various relationships, such as inheritance and containment
Discuss our experience and the benefits that we have obtained from using this strategy

Tom Spitzer? is a software industry and IT services veteran, having been the lead technologist at both consulting and software development companies for over 25 years. As part of the EC Wise senior team, he leads the company's secure development and secure database implementation practices. Over the years, Tom has made presentations at many technical conferences and written for a variety of industry publications. Prior to EC Wise, Tom was CTO at a late 90's venture backed e-commerce startup and earlier was Chief Architect for SBT Accounting Systems, which at the time was the leader in providing source code accounting software and accounting software built on commercial database products.