Database defintion from an Excel Spec?

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Home » Article Discussions » Article Discussions by Author » Discuss content posted by Ian Hadlington » Database defintion from an Excel Spec?

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Database defintion from an Excel Spec?

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Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 12:18 AM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Database defintion from an Excel Spec?

Post #817632

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 12:44 AM

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I know the big vendors want to hold programmers captive in their IDEs (studios) but I'll never give up the programmer's editor that I use -- Epsilon. Using Epsilon macros and its regular expression search-and-replace, it's so easy to make scripts from text and to clean huge datasets.

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Post #817642

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 2:07 AM

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Nice article but why do you say you will never need to use this again?

I've been using Excel to design tables for a few years, table designs can then easily be shared with the rest of the team, comments can be added and changes easily made. Its also fairly easy to lift the data from Excel and drop it into Word for the design documentation.

Once the design is final its a quick job to build the create table/index/foreign key scripts as your article details.

Post #817659

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 4:24 AM

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When the software is a major application designed and tested by a third party, that third party is required to install it on our servers and prove it working before it can be signed off (and they get paid).
No way would I get into that awful situation in the first place but well done for finding a solution.

Post #817711

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 4:40 AM

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Nice Spreadsheet, in my job , I Tend to get the Data in the Tables rather the the Spec's , it is up to me/the team to decide the specifications

Eventually , as I seemed to be doing it on a daily basis I ended up writing some VBA which Analyzed all the Data in the Columns and then built the Tables around the information , this tended to save me much more time. I haven't used it since I upgrade to Excel 2007 and Therefore I have not updated the Context menu's that let me execute this

But at some point I'll do that and put up Post for it

There is usually some minor alterations , like setting Keys and and Adding a couple of Columns , but most of the leg work is done so its just tweaks

Post #817716

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 4:53 AM

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In the old version of Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit" book there is an excel spreadsheet that can be used to design databases and create/execute DDL. That goes back to 1997 and I recall it's pretty good.

Just a thought...

Post #817721

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 5:43 AM

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That's a good workaround but there are modeling tools available that will build a database, logical and physical models from a spreadsheet. Then again, some of the contractors I have dealt with would gladly bill 80 hours to type in table definitions. Why would you deal with a vendor that wouldn't supply a build script? Did the person that purchased this product factor in the additional 10K in cost just to begin to set up the program?

Post #817749

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 6:12 AM

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you mean I could get 10k just for writing a script ... right im on that :)

Post #817762

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 6:14 AM

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With some vendors, once you get past the shiney sales patter and have been convinced into signing on the dotted line, can be very obstructive.

Post #817766

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 6:16 AM

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hickymanz (11/12/2009)

you mean I could get 10k just for writing a script ... right im on that :)

Unfortunately only the big consultancies can get away with charging £1000 per day for consultants.

Post #817769

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