The purpose of the Chain Finder Dialog box is to provide a visual indication of the relationships between tables and to suggest possible candidates for manual rules. The Chain Finder is a very important tool which can greatly speed up the building of extraction sets.

The DataBee Chain Finder Dialog Box

The Chain Finder dialog box is very easy to use. Shortly after the dialog box starts, the panel at the left will fill with a list of each table involved in the Extraction Set. Associated with each table are three columns "Children","Source Rows" and "Extracted Rows". Clicking on a table name in the left hand panel will cause a tree display to appear in the right hand panel. This tree shows all dependent tables and their relationships.

Note: The symbol [+...] which appears in the tree view indicates that the table has previously appeared at a higher level and will not have its dependant tables listed again. In practice the [+...] symbol indicates the presence of a "loop". Such loops are quite common in complex Extraction Sets.

What the columns mean

Children

The Children column indicates the number of dependencys a table has. The Children column is a basic indicator of the number of tables likely to get populated if the parent table is populated. A review of the number of Children column will quickly isolate the major "driving" tables of the rule set. A highly effective technique in designing Extraction Sets is to populate a small number of the tables with the largest number of children and then let the rules populate all of the dependent tables.

Source Rows

The Source Rows column indicates the number of rows the table contains in the source schema. This figure will only be available if you have a Source Row Count file associated with the Extraction Set. If no information is available the column will contain a "?" character. Source Row Count files can be obtained through the use of the Get Source Row Counts from Schema tool on the Set Designer Rule Tools tab.

Extracted Rows

The Extracted Rows column indicates the number of rows the table received in the last extract. The Extracted Rows file is produced automatically by the DataBee Set Extractor application and is automatically associated with the Extraction Set name. If no Extracted row information is available the column will contain a "?" character.

The Buttons

View Rule

When a dependent table has been selected in the right hand panel of the tree display, the View Rule button will become active. Clicking on this button will start a dialog box that displays the rule which enforces the relationship between the selected table and its parent.

Ignore Manually Added Relationships

Some rules are based on foreign keys while others are manually added. The default display illustrates table relationships derived from both sources. If you wish to see the table relationships which are based on foreign keys check this option.