4.2EA is mostly bug fixes but there are also some new features that I think you should know about. I will blog about some of them in a serie of What’s new in Data Modeler 4.2EA posts. This is the first one of that serie.

Design rules for a subview or a selected set of objects

Starting in version 4.2.0 (build 917) known as 4.2EA you can apply design rules to objects in a subview (they will not be applied to objects that do not exist in this subview). Simply right-click on the canvas of a subview and select Design Rules.

You can also select one or more objects from the canvas, right-click and select Design Rules. The rules will only apply to the selected objects.

What is a Design Rule?

https://helifromfinland.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/design-rules/

I love the Oracle OpenWorld time: interesting things happen!

Data Modeler 4.1.5 is out but so is the EA for 4.2!

Go and download:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/datamodeler/downloads/datamodeler-087275.html

What’s new in 4.1.5? Plenty of bugs fixed:

“Date: September 2016

This list contains only a selection of higher priority bugs, customer bugs and issues raised by the community on the OTN Forum since the release of version 4.1.3.

”

Let’s talk more about EA 4.2 a bit later…

Cheers,

Heli

Stop guessing and define it yourself!

Go to Preferences:

Select Environment, Log. Then select Save Logs to File and define the Log Directory.

What is the difference between Delet Object and Delete View?

If you right-click and object in a diagram there might be two options: Delete Object and Delete View. “Might” because the Delete View is only available if you have that object in more than one diagram.

Delete Object removes that object totally from the design: from this diagram and from all diagrams where it exists. The object is totally deleted from the design. If the object exists in more than one diagram, you will also see the Delete View option. That will delete the object BUT only from this diagram, not from the whole design.

Let’s see an example with an entity called Product.

This is the Logical Model:

This is a subview:

Now in the subview I select Delete View for the entity Product.

The Logical Model still has the entity Product:

But the subview does not:

Name Substitution can be used to change the name of an object (user, role, table, index, or tablespace) while generating the DDLs. These changes do NOT affect your design. The most common use case is that in test environment something is different from the production environment but not so much that it would be worth maintaining two separate physical models.

Let’s assume that everything is the same in both test and production except the schema owner of the objects: in production they are owned my PROD and in test by TEST. To be able to get the DDLs for creating tables for the test environment we double-click the design name (or right-click and select Properties) in Browser, then go to DDL | Migration.

Press the green plus and define the rule for Name Substitution and press Apply.

Now the rule for changing word “PROD” to “TEST” has been defined but this will not cause any action while generating the DDLs unless you specifically tell the tool to use this.

Let’s generate the DDL (File | Export | DDL File). Now go to Name Substitution tab and make sure the rule has been selected (Selected is enabled):

You can also create new rules in this screen. Just press the green plus and add the rule.

Now go to Object Types tab and select the object types you want this rule to be affecting:

Now you have defined the rule and which object it will be affecting but still if you now press OK (to generate the DDLs nothing will be changed). Next thing to do is to enable the Apply Name Substitution checkbox on the bottom of the screen:

Now press OK.

Instead of getting a DDL like this:

CREATE TABLE PROD.Customer
(
CustNO NUMBER (10) NOT NULL ,
Name   VARCHAR2 (100) NOT NULL
)
LOGGING ;
ALTER TABLE PROD.Customer ADD CONSTRAINT Customer_PK PRIMARY KEY ( CustNO ) ;

…

you get a DDL like this:

CREATE TABLE TEST.Customer
(
CustNO NUMBER (10) NOT NULL ,
Name   VARCHAR2 (100) NOT NULL
)
LOGGING ;
ALTER TABLE TEST.Customer ADD CONSTRAINT Customer_PK PRIMARY KEY ( CustNO ) ;

…

I know, I know. You can have the DDLs without the schema owner, connect in the database with the right credentials and problem solved without the schema owner added to the script. But I do make mistakes, like connect to a wrong database, so I prefer having the DDLs as human error free as possible. Besides this is just a simple example how Name Substitution can be used 🙂

Quite often we need to set the same properties for several objects in the physical model. It would be very time consuming if we do it one by one… Luckily the tool offers a way to do it much easier.

I would like to set the schema owner to all my tables to PROD. How do I do it?

First set the property for one of the tables:

Then press Propagate Properties.

Since we only want to copy the property User, press Deselect All (in the upper part of the screen, Properties section), then select User:

Select all the tables in the bottom of the screen by pressing Select All in the Object section of the screen:

Then press OK.

Now the schema owner for all the tables has been changed to PROD: