[teiid-designer-dev] [teiid-dev] Translator based Metadata

[Steven Hawkins]

Moving over to designer dev.  There are several integration options to get most of the importer code out of Designer:

1. Reuse translator libraries in Designer (but increases code dependency on Teiid).
2. Require a running server and use the dynamic vdb approach to capture a physical model.
  a. serialize the metadata objects for consumption by Designer (same as 1).
  b. as Ramesh suggests create a ddl dump for consumption by Designer.

Either of the above approaches do provide a path toward a Designer integration of custom Translators that does not also involve necessarily coding a custom importer GUI.

The hold ups for a redesign are that the import code, especially for JDBC, is quite expansive and intricately tied to the GUI.  Also Teiid Translators to not advertise their import properties and Translators just provides a single getMetadata call that gets the full form or all metadata.  Translators do not yet provide more interrogative methods that are better fits in a multi-step wizard - such as just providing schema/table/procedure names for multi-select filtering prior to full import.  

At one point it was also proposed to get rid of or hide physical models.  I somewhat agree with that, however designer still needs to display the source metadata in some view and there are still situations that require hand-crafted metadata as a workaround (ldap, using sequences, etc.).  Also for performance reasons the source metadata will need to be cached somewhere (which can also include being supplied to Teiid as an index file or DDL).  A possible compromise is that VDBs in Teiid 8+ do have the ability to layer in metadata, so it is possible to let the bulk of the metadata be defined by "import foreign schema", but also to layer in additional metadata as needed.  

----- Original Message -----
> I have a proposal on how to import translator based medadata in the
> Teiid Designer instead of creating a custom importer each time we add
> a
> new source.
> 
> To support dynamic VDBs, Teiid team creates metadata facilities for
> most
> sources, it is prudent to use same facility in the Designer for
> importing metadata rather than creating another facility. Currently
> it
> is determined that "DatabaseMetadata" object is not sufficient and
> Teiid
> does not expose any Admin API method for this.
> 
> In 8.0, Teiid defined DDL based matadata importer for a translator,
> if
> we write a reverse of this, where one can export DDL from the
> imported
> metadata then Teiid can provide a Admin API method for this, thus
> allowing the Teiid Designer to hook into Teiid and retrieve the
> metadata. Any thoughts?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Ramesh..
> 
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