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Oracle Designer/2000 |
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Product Review |
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The trade press reports that Oracle is showing a beta of a completely reworked Designer/2000. The new face is said to be smart and pretty. That's a lot more than we've come to expect from the database giant. But they've always had the means - just lacked the will. We're eager to see the new version. | |||||
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Oracle's Designer/2000
is a very large tool set which, according to Oracle,
covers the complete lifecycle of information systems
design. It includes modules for discovery and
analysis (through data flow diagramming), process
modeling and simulation, data modeling and database
design, and code construction (on a limited number of
surfaces). But we don't care. We had our strict data modelers' hats on as we examined Designer/2000. In fact we barely even pushed the buttons for other functions. On the good side, that's consistent with how we have looked at CASEwise, LBMS (now Select ) Systems Engineer, and Popkin's System Architect, so at least we are comparing oranges to oranges (no Apples here). On the down side, if your needs weigh more heavily on complete integration of methodology than on optimized data modeling, then our point of view will not be enough to support a meaningful judgement. But this is all we have time for so we provide honesty and candor in lieu of completeness. |
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Designer/2000
is unmistakably of the SSADM tools style: very
formal; rather inconsiderate of the user. The
formalisms, well presented in Richard Barker's classic
work, include the graphics for entities,
relationships, cardinalities, identifiers, and other
components of the model. Those familiar with the
Oracle CASE approach will be conformable. The rest of
us may find the terminology less expressive. The bigger problems are speed, or the lack thereof, and dialog organization, which is very dumb. Regarding speed, nearly everything in Designer/2000 is driven from the database with stored procedures. We see the evidence in over a thousand procedures installed with the product. While that fact is neither good nor bad, performance with a single-user Personal Oracle database on a PentiumPro 200 running NT 4.0 was abysmal. It was so bad that we chose not to construct our usual extended model to test handling over 400 entities and 2,000 attributes. Many routine edits suffer a delay of several seconds while the datamonster chews up your entries searching for a suitably tart rejection message. |
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One could counter that
perhaps our Oracle database instance needed tuning
for optimal behavior. But frankly, we're looking for
success in the first half day, which pretty well
shuts out an appointment with the data docs. And we
don't generally carry along a DBA at 35,000 feet
while working on the laptop so expecting deep tech
support at your elbow is not a very practical
solution. That is an indicator of a looming characteristic of Designer/2000. It is big, humungous, gigantic! Where other tools may take 30-50MB, Designer/2000 and its host database instance of Personal Oracle 7 claimed 700MB! While Personal Oracle went into both NT and Win95 smoothly, installing and loading the Designer/2000 repository was a nightmare. The manual details about fifteen complex steps in ten pages and warns that the process takes four to six hours! Most products install in four to six minutes. What the product literature doesn't warn you about is that you will need a DBA, or substantial DBA skills, to configure the database before installing Designer/2000. There are about a dozen arcane SQL statements to create tablespaces, grant rights, and create objects. In our two installations, five attempts of four to five hours each we required to get past errors, log file traces, reconfigurations, and restarts. In an era when nearly every purchased software product installs with InstallShield and anticipates all the possible quirks, we cannot accept the necessity of an attendant DBA just to install a tool. Even Office 97 doesn't demand that! |
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Nothing terribly
special. The logical E-R portion of Designer/2000
is very sparsely populated with nothing but entities
(including their attributes) and relationships. So
far, so good. Relationships move easily from one
entity to another. Relationship labels can be
positioned manually or automatically. Constructing
generalization with super-types is a piece of cake -
just drag the super-to-be over its intended sub-type
entities. Moving objects is fast and simple, at least
until you encounter an error with some horribly
cryptic message, of which there are too many. But the text entry windows and dialogs are very first generation. They suffer from poor visual and logical organization. For example, the Edit Entity window has separate tabs for Attribute, with a multiple occurrence list, and Attribute Detail, which shows all the expanded properties of any selected attribute. There is no visual correlation between these two tabs and you are forced to constantly jump between them to populate an entity. Rather than to bore you with numerous such narratives, let us just say that the window style is dumb. Since the primary mission of most data models is to represent some real database instance, we must consider which sorts of DBMS products are targeted by Designer/2000. Not surprisingly, these are exclusively the Oracle product line. No DB2, Informix, Sybase, or Microsoft spoken here. The choices for schema generation are "ANSI", "Any", or "Oracle". This is terminally limiting for many of us who work both in and out of the Oracle world. |
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There are much better tools for data modeling per se. If you must cohabit with Oracle, wait till late 1997 to see what arrives with Sedona, their new object repository. If you need complete systems modeling integration targeted to any non-Oracle database product, look elsewhere. If you get Designer/2000 thrown in for nothing with your database products, there's no need to complain. It isn't bad at all (except for the speed) - it's just not good enough. | |||||
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In its June 21 issue, Computerworld reports (pg. 12) that "sales of Oracle's tools are already slacking off. A 7.5% decline in tools revenue was one blot on the solid fiscal 1997 financial results ...". The article goes on to say that there will be new versions of Designer/2000 and Developer/2000 to accompany Oracle8. | |||||
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Charlton Barreto's Comments on Oracle 2000 | |||||
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"This crappy tool
is driving me nuts! Designer/2000 Dataflow
Diagrammer. What's it, 2000 mouse commands for every diagram? There aren't any function keys?!? Scaling functions, fit to page(s) are so awkward. Rescaling chops off object names causing manual resizing of all objects with related text. Ick Ick Ick!!! To straighten a flow line requires moving BOTH end points independently. Error messages are OBTUSE. I'm trying to get a quick evaluation copy of PowerDesigner in here. Even Bachman is better than this!" |
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Oracle Corp.
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