Who can use DB-MAIN?

DB-MAIN is suitable for professionals, education and research.

DB-MAIN for professionnals

The tool is primarly designed for the data architect community.

The specific requirements of large, complex, multi-paradigm schema processing have been carefully evaluated, including extensive field-testing. That has enabled us to create many features that alleviate otherwise high-risk, prone-to-failure or tedious tasks.

Some processors include very specific knowledge on how to solve such problems as finding hidden foreign keys, finding data flows across programs or generating DDL scripts that preserve the complex semantics of the conceptual schema.

The Meta Development add-ons are specially designed for method engineers, project leaders and database administrators.

Personalized support, commercial plugins, customized plugin development and training are also available to engineers in the professional use of DB-MAIN.

DB-MAIN for education and research

DB-MAIN allows students and teachers to build large (but size-limited) schemas. It requires very few resources and it’s free, which might help explain why it is used in many schools and universities.

The teachers can use DB-MAIN at three levels:

• Introductory: Its natural and intuitive graphical interface makes DB-MAIN a basic graphical schema editor and code generator. It’s well suited to teaching even novice students the concepts of database modelling and design. The first steps tutorial (First steps in Help menu of DB-MAIN) is an hour-long tutorial specially designed with these students in mind.
• Standard: More advanced features, such as simple transformations and the elementary Global Transformation Assistant, can be integrated into standard Database design courses. The 12-lesson Introduction to Database Design tutorial can be used as part of such a course.
• Advanced: The DB-MAIN components can be used to support advanced courses on database evolution, maintenance, migration, integration, reverse engineering and reengineering.