Dividing DataBee into several smaller modules rather than placing all of the functionality in a single larger application is designed to minimize the number of decisions that you, the user, must make as the software is used. The architecture of the problem lends itself to such a solution. At any time in the process one is either planning a set, designing a set, extracting a set, creating the target environment or loading a set. These are very separate actions and there is no need to have other functionality co-located in the same application. To do so would add complexity and present an array of irrelevant visual information. To put it bluntly, using separate applications reduces the learning curve because there are fewer decisions to be made. In any one DataBee application everything visible is always relevant to the task at hand.

The DataBee Applications:

Set Planner

The DataBee Set Planner application is used to make decisions about the tables which will or will not be included in an Extraction Set. As a tool it is intended define the components of the Extraction Set. The output of the Set Planner is a written report which can be referenced later during the creation of an Extraction Set in the Set Designer application.

Set Designer

In order to extract rows from the source database DataBee needs rules which indicate how the tables are related to each other. The Set Designer application contains tools to help build the collection of rules required for an extract (called an Extraction Set) and can discover rules already contained within the database as well as manually adding, deleting and editing rules.

Set Extractor

The Set Extractor application takes the Extraction Set created by the Set Designer and identifies the rows in the source Oracle database which will be required to populate the target database. It outputs the identifiers of these rows to a binary file called the Extracted Set File.

Set Loader

The Set Loader application reads the Extracted Set File output by the Set Extractor application and uses it to pull the rows from the source to the destination database. It will also take care of enabling the appropriate database constraints and triggers. Once the Set Loader has finished, the target database will be populated with a referentially correct subset of the data currently in the source database.

The DDL Wizard

The DDL Wizard application can read the DDL of a source schema and recreate the structure (using configurable rules) in a much smaller target environment. This tool is designed to reduce the size specifications of objects and can perform such actions as adjusting the DDL source to fold many tablespaces into a much smaller number. The DDL Wizard also has other capabilities which makes it a generally useful application. For example, the DDL Wizard can create a HTML tree of the DDL source code for a schema.

Further Information:

An overview of the design, extraction and load process.

A discussion of Extraction Sets.

More information about Extraction Set rules.

The DataBee Quick Start Guide.