Designer 2000 - Reverse Engineering

[Mark_Woz]

Hi Guys

This is technically not a pure DBA question, but I assume most DBA's have at some stage used Designer 2000 for Reverse Engineering.

I need to know if Designer 6i can Reverse Engineer
(Capture Database Design) an Oracle Database running on a VAX (OpenVMS Ver 7.1-2), Oracle 7.3.4.3.0.
I have successfully reverse engineered databases ver 8i, 7.3.4 on NT.

I am about to order a copy of Designer 6i.
Need to make 100% sure I don't need an earlier version of Designer 2000 ?

[TerryD]

I didn't think designer 6i was supported against 7.3.4 - only 8.1.6 at the moment (with 8.1.7 support coming in a patch soon).
I think you'll need to run designer 6.0 against the 7.3.4 database - at least that's what I had to do.

[Mark_Woz]

Thanks - there does'nt seem to be many Designer2000
users logging onto this website.

[rcaballe]

(I'm guessing)
If you can RE an ODBC database, why you can't RE a 7.x?
Certification in Designer means whether you are allowed to use an Oracle DB as a repository or not, not as a source or deployment DB.
I hope it helps.

[Mark_Woz]

Let me expand a bit on the problem.
I have some Oracle Databases (7.3.4) running on Vaxes
that were developed a good few years back, without the
use of D2000. A whole bunch of application support staff
have recently arrived, and need to learn the structure of
the databases quickly, and easily.

By reverse engineering the database structure into Designer,
we can re-create the ERD's (Entity Relation Diagrams) and
Data Diagrams which are one of the better features of Designer.

By the way, TerryD, how many tables were in the database
you reverse engineered ? Has Designer 2000 got over that
problem they had in 1.3.2 and 2.1.2 - the reverse engineering
seems to hang if the number of tables is very large ?
(I reverse engineered a small number of tables - this
time there will be 100's)

[rcaballe]

I would ask the last version of Designer.
I repeat, I don't think you will have problem as long as you don't use the 7.3 DB as the repository.

[Mark_Woz]

Okay, that's a bit clearer.
Except for one problem I did'nt mention before. (oops)
The site I am on has not upgraded to 8i yet, and the latest
version they are on is ver 8.0.5. So if I put the repository
on an 8.0.5 database, do I assume TerryD is correct,
or can I use 6i ?

[rcaballe]

No, you can't. :)
I would recommend to install 8.1.6 in a NT machine and have there the repository.
[url]http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showFrameDocument?p_database_id=NOT&p_id=60705.1[/url]
This is the certification matrix.