Help me Make Sense of this Database
·852 words·5 mins
We use a proprietary software application that stores a great deal of operational data for our company. The product vendor does not provide any documentation. We want to extract and report from its tables. How would you go about investigating this system? What sorts of support could you offer on this type of project?
Depending upon the application, your data may be distributed over 100 or more tables each having dozens of columns. In many cases, you are primarily interested in only 5 to 20 of these tables – but precisely how do you identify those tables and map the “join” relationships between them? How can you understand the system when no database documentation is provided?