Application developers and business people accessing relational databases need data dictionaries in order to properly load or query a database. The data dictionary provides a source of information about the model for those without model access, including entity/table and attribute/column definitions, datatypes, primary keys, relationships among tables, and so on. The data dictionary also provides data modelers with a useful cross reference that improves modeling productivity.
It is particularly useful for the dictionary to be a filterable/sortable Excel document, but out of the box ERwin, one of the leading data modeling tools, includes a notably inflexible reporting capability. Luckily, it is possible to directly query the ERwin “metamodel”. However, I found the ERwin documentation a bit hard to decipher and not quite accurate. Hopefully this post will save modelers some steps in figuring out how to query the metamodel.
Here are the topics covered:
- ODBC drivers in the ERwin install
- Reporting experience in MS Access, WinSQL, and MS Excel Continue reading