DB2 Universal Database Version 8.2 and the Rational Extreme Development Environment - Page 3

Forward engineering the data model

You can take your data model and forward engineer it into a product or, more likely, a test environment. The Rational XDE will either generate the data definition language (DDL) for your model, create the data model, or both. To generate a data model, select the database from the Model Explorer window, right-click the mouse button, and select Data Modeler`Forward Engineer.

A wizard will help you select the objects that you want to forward engineer, specify a file to contain the generated DDL, and specify a database to execute the DDL, or any combination thereof. In the example below, I chose to generate the DDL for the data model. This DDL could be checked into Rational Clear Case or source control program from the IDE and re-used for a test environment:

As you can see, only the DDL for my table was generated, which is all I selected in the wizard.

Reverse engineering the data model

So far in this article, I have shown you how to create and forward engineer a data model into a test or production environment. You can also generate a data model from an existing database and work with it in the Rational XDE. You can reverse engineer a data model by selecting your project from the Model Explorer window, right-clicking the project, and selecting the Reverse Engineer option. A wizard will help you through the process. You can reverse engineer your data model from an existing DDL file (for example, the one that you created using the Rational XDE, or one created using the db2look command), or from a database, as shown below:

As you can see in the previous figure, I decided to connect to the BANKDB database and reverse engineer only the table spaces for my database. (As you can see, the USERSPACE1 table space contains two tables, DEPTXDE and EMPXDE.)

At this point, you could add more objects to the data model and synchronize the changes back into the database, or vice versa.

For example, you can see in the previous figure that I added a view to the data model. (To do this, follow the instructions to add a table outlined earlier in this article, only instead of a database realization, draw a view dependency.) The view is based on tables that exist in the table space but were not imported as objects into the model since they are part of a different schema.