Designing & Engineering Interbase
Databases
New in Release
2.6
Introduction
Borland’s Interbase is
a powerful small footprint databases designed for use in situations
where there is no database administrator or IT support. Visual Case provides full
support for the most used features of Interbase and also
facilitates the migration from older
versions.
Using
Visual Case to Design Interbase
Databases
An Interbase database
can be built in Visual Case using the design tools or by reverse
engineering an existing database. If a design already exists for a
database of a different type it can be converted to
Interbase.
For an introduction to
database design, visit our
database design
tutorial
.
Columns –
these are built in the table property page. Select a standard or
user-defined data type from the list.
Data-types –
Visual Case supports all the standard data
types.
Custom
Data-types – User defined data types can be defined from the
database property page. Custom types are both forward and reverse
engineered.
Constraints –
Both table and column constraints are
supported.
Indexes –
Indexes are supported including primary, unique and ascending or
descending.
Foreign Keys – These are supported with restrict, set null, default
or cascade on delete. On update can be restrict or cascade. Setting
the child cardinality will synchronize the "allow null" option on
the foreign key columns and create a unique index if the cardinality
is "one only".
Triggers –
These are fully supported and are easy to design using our SQL
editor.
Stored
Procedures & Views – These are
defined in the database property page. Undock the editor to edit a
long stored procedure or view.
SQL Editor – This is an automatically
activated editing tool which is aware of the standard language
features and names of dictionary objects.
Engineering Interbase Databases
Visual Case's database engineering wizard will forward and
reverse engineers all database attributes that can be defined in your
Visual Case design of an Interbase database.
The
wizard allows you to compare the differences between your database
design and the physical database before completing either the
forward or the reverse engineer.
The
forward engineer builds a SQL script that can be saved and
manually run at a later time.
You
can quickly forward-engineer a single entity (table, stored
procedure, etc.) from its right-click menu or from its property
page.
For more information about forward and
reverse-engineering databases, please visit our
database engineering
tutorial
.
Migrating to Interbase
Visual Case will convert any supported database
type to Interbase. Visual Case will also reverse engineer most ODBC
or JDBC data sources to Interbase, even if the physical database is
not a type directly supported by Visual
Case.
Because of differences
between database data types conversion is usually a one-way process.
For example, converting a SQL Server varchar(300) column to Access
will produce a column of type memo as Access’s text data type is
limited to 255 characters. Converting back to SQL Server will
produce a column of type text as a memo column can be quite
long!
Free Trial Download
Finally, download the 30 day free trial
of Visual Case and get started.
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