Datamaster™

Datamaster is a universal object database generation, management, access and analysis tool. It manages the expensive and time consuming complexities that confront even simple database applications. It provides direct support for the creation and life cycle support of database applications, especially web based applications.

Serving applications via the internet using the world wide web is a trend that will become increasingly prominent. It offers the convenience of centralized application management and automatic application migration, with minimal platform requirements on the client side.

Consequently, tools that simplify and make natural the creation and support of modern applications and on-line services will become indispensable.

Datamaster address directly many of the issues that confront the orderly development of a database/web application.

Implementing an object model as a relational database is a difficult and error prone process. Improper key assignment can induce data dependencies that limit the database utility and compromise its performance. A typical and unfortunate practice is using multiple data fields as keys. Composite objects require imposition of integrity constraints and cascading operations. It is easy to lose sight of the overall purpose of each of these requirements.

Writing SQL commands against the database is also difficult and non-intuitive. Database navigation requires detailed technical knowledge of the database table structure, which often bears little resemblance to the object model it represents. Tables often contain extra fields such as time stamps and security marks that must be handled in ways that are best automated. It is especially important that the correct security constraints are incorporated into SQL.

Even slight changes in the underlying object model result in massive changes throughout the application and database source code, and may entail changes to operational databases. Usually, programmers embed essential design information in implementation and platform specific code. Even when starting with an object model, the step of translating into a data model is usually manual. Although some UML tools support this translation, the process is awkward, incomplete, and commingles-mingles abstract and implementation information. This reduces the flexibility, scalability, and adaptability of the resulting product.

Datamaster is designed to ameliorate these problems by isolating essential design information in an object model and automating most of the software development and support process. Thus the developmental cost, time, and error-rate is reduced. It is much easier to understand and correct the objects and their relationships to each other when they can be visualized using high level class diagrams that are devoid of implementation details.

Datamaster provides the following capabilities:

• Data Model Generation. Automatic generation of a relational database and its data model from an object model. Key fields, foreign key fields, data access control fields, and join tables are added automatically to the data model.
• Data Access. Query, insert, delete, and update entire objects in the database using a powerful query-by-example access language based on XML syntax. These object accesses may span multiple tables and use multiple joins. Data transactions are automatically begun and committed or rolled back, as needed, to ensure object level consistency and integrity.
• Data Access Control. Capabilities based access control. Controls access to data by user, owner, table, row, column, and access path, and capabilities granted to user by owner.
• Data Migration. Supports the migration of data from old to new data models.
• Multiple database support. May use many different RDBMS's as a data repository. Currently PostgreSQL is the default.
• Ad hoc query. Supports the formation of queries to the database on an ad hoc basis. This is done with a user interface that supports the authoring, parameterization, storage and retrieval, merging, and execution of query components. The user first constructs a library of phrases, representing the subjects, topics, and refinements of various questions. The user then formulates questions by selecting from a menu of these phrases. The system answers the question by translating it into a collection of queries, prompting the user for parameter values (or extracting then from the environment), executing the queries, assembling the data into a standard format (XML), and then displaying the data in various ways.
• Data display and analysis. Default output structure is an XML hierarchical document that can easily be transformed into a variety of other formats, included pivoted tables, charts and graphs, and map overlays.
• Automated Application Construction. By combining the capabilities provided by the data access, display, analysis, and ad hoc query facilities with application templates and configuration tools, application construction is automated, and look and feel customization provided.

Thus Datamaster ensures the transactional integrity and consistency of the database on an object level. This is especially important when data is aged out of an operational database and retired to an archive.

Datamaster uses any relational database system as a data repository. The model can be extended to access other file systems and computational engines.
Datamaster is software that makes SENSE. It is Simple, Efficient, Natural, Scalable, and Extensible.