Rational Data Architect and DB2 9: Storage Diagrams - Page 2

• Navigate – Instantly changes focus from the selected object in the designer canvas to the location of the object in the Database Explorer view for subsequent action. This is a very convenient feature when you need to work with the objects in your storage diagram – especially if that diagram, and the schema it represents, is very large.

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• File->Save Image Map - Allows you to save the image map to a file system as one of the following formats: GIF, BMP, JPEG, or SVG. For example:

  

  Once the image map is saved to disk, you can work with it like a regular file. The SVG format saves the storage diagram into an XML format that can be used from other facilities (beyond the scope of this article) in Rational DA:

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• Edit - Provides basic editing functions such as copy, cut, paste, undo, and redo operations.

• Delete from Diagram – Deletes an object from a storage diagram.

• Format – Provides various visual controls over the formatting of objects in the storage map. For example, you can select to make the color of buffer pool objects green for easier identification.

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  The previous figure shows some of the many formatting options that you can use to control the visualization effects of the objects in a storage diagram.

• Filters – Allows you to filter information about a selected object within the storage map. In this article, I didn’t cover the information that’s displayed by default for the objects in a storage map; I’ve left that for you to discover. However, filtering allows you to control what information is displayed.

  For example, the DATABASEJOURNAL table space looks like:

  

  You can click the highlighted toggle control () in the previous figure to hide, or show, default information.

  If you don’t want to toggle information, you can filter it. For example, perhaps you never need access to the actual path location of the DATABASEJOURNAL table space’s container. You can hide it using the toggle control, but this wastes space on the image map when you have a large number of attributes associated with an object. In contrast, filtering it removes the toggle and gives you more landscape on the canvas. For example, filtering allows you to avoid objects that look like this:

  

  Rational DA gives you a number of filters for objects within a storage map, as well as controls for how the information is displayed.

  For example, you might want to include a schema name along with its associated object names, as shown below:

  

• Show Properties View – Quickly shifts focus to the Properties view that was detailed earlier in this article. What’s nice about this feature is often you may be working without this part of the IDE in plain view, and this option provides a quick method by which you can get to the an object’s properties in a timely manner.

When you right-click on the designer canvas without selecting an object, you get a similar pop-up menu that has some additional features. I’m not going to cover them here (because I want you to experiment), but ones that haven’t already been mentioned in this article are illustrated in the following figure:

One last thing: the palette

The palette contains a number of objects that you can use to further illustrate the storage diagram. Some of these have already been covered such as notes and lines, and so on. The palette offers even more flexibility and customization possibilities. Again, I’ll let you experiment with these objects. I altered my storage diagram to look like this:

Wrapping it all up

In this article, I showed you how to create and customize storage diagrams using the Database Explorer view. Storage diagrams are terrific communication vehicles that are not only useful within the data server team but also really shine when used across the entire IT organization. In my next article, I will show you the rest of the features available in the Database Explorer view.

» See All Articles by Columnist Paul C. Zikopoulos

About the Author

Paul C. Zikopoulos, BA, MBA, is an award-winning writer and speaker with the IBM Database Competitive Technology team. He has more than ten years of experience with DB2 and has written more than one hundred articles and several books about it. Paul has co-authored the books: Information on DB2 9 New Features, Demand: Introduction DB2 9 New Features, DB2 Version 8: The Official Guide, DB2: The Complete Reference, DB2 Fundamentals Certification for Dummies, DB2 for Dummies, and A DBA's Guide to Databases on Linux. Paul is a DB2 Certified Advanced Technical Expert (DRDA and Cluster/EEE) and a DB2 Certified Solutions Expert (Business Intelligence and Database Administration). In his spare time, he enjoys all sorts of sporting activities, running with his dog Chachi, and trying to figure out the world according to Chloë – his new daughter. You can reach him at: mailto:paulz_ibm@msn.com.

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Disclaimer

The opinions, solutions, and advice in this article are from the author’s experiences and are not intended to represent official communication from IBM or an endorsement of any products listed within. Neither the author nor IBM is liable for any of the contents in this article. The accuracy of the information in this article is based on the author’s knowledge at the time of writing.