Are you considering making a change to your view or stored procedure? Or possibly you are considering moving your database to another server and you want to know how the move would impact your SQL Server. 

With one of Pragmatic Works software tools, BI Documenter, you can easily identify how your environment would be effected.  One of the nice features in BI Documenter is called the Impact Analysis/Object Lineage. When you have selected the various BI components (SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS and SSRS) to document in your environment, you can click on the Impact Analysis/Object Lineage link as shown in Figure 1 below. 

Figure 1: BI Documenter’s Impact Analysis/Object Lineage Link Button

In Figure 2 below, you will see that I have rendered a table as a diagram. From here, we can see how the Report is being fed information from a table. And a View is a consumer of data from the table. By just this image alone it is obvious that if you make a change to this table, it could impact a Report and a View.

Figure 2: Table Diagram: Impact Analysis/Object Lineage

With the Impact Analysis/Object Lineage feature of BI Documenter, you will be able to see who are the Consumers, Providers and the Modifiers of the data. You will also see the Foreign and Primary Key relationships. Now you and/or your team can visually see the impact that could be made when they want to make alterations to their environment. These diagrams can easily be exported as an image or saved for your compiled chm or html documentation produced by the tool. Check out all the other great features you can get with BI Documenter here.

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