Re: [teiid-dev] VDB metadata consumed by Teiid
Did you guys kill off the command-line vdb tool? Seems like that was one possible
direction for importing physical metadata and potentially to add views within a
lightweight tool.
Another possibly crazy idea that I would seriously consider these days is using an
embedded dsl / builder in a language like Groovy to define vdb metadata. You could take
the groovy script itself as the vdb definition or even run it to produce a compiled vdb.
If you were clever enough, the dsl could be extensible to allow metadata creation with new
metamodels. But this is probably only a valid solution if you expect a developer or other
suitably precise user to be the target.
----- Original Message ----
From: John Verhaeg <jverhaeg(a)redhat.com>
To: teiid-dev(a)lists.jboss.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2009 10:47:26 AM
Subject: [teiid-dev] VDB metadata consumed by Teiid
I'd like to kick off a discussion concerning one of the obstacles to getting
users to embrace Teiid: you currently can't provide the metadata that Teiid
requires to integrate data from multiple data sources without the aid of Teiid
Designer. The Designer is a large footprint client application that requires
particular versions of Java, Eclipse, and several Eclipse-based libraries, and
has a non-trivial learning curve. The metadata that is produced by the Designer
and consumed by Teiid Embedded (hereafter referred to simply as the "server",
although the full Teiid server is not yet available) is represented in a
non-standard, binary format, which means:
1) Unlike most other JBoss solutions, the server cannot expose new features that
require additional metadata without first waiting for its client tooling to
support the creation and manipulation of that metadata.
2) There is no easy path to convert the models and metadata produced by
complimentary data modeling tools (such as for ERwin or some ETL product) to the
format required by Teiid without manual reproduction by the user or the use of
proprietary, non-OSS products.
One of the suggested solutions to these issues involves changing the format of
our metadata files (i.e., index files) within VDBs to be represented by DDL.
Thus, at a minimum, a valid VDB could be created using nothing more than a
simple text editor and possibly an archive utility. But is this really
feasible? I'm sure there's a plethora of things to consider, but here are some
of the questions that immediately come to mind:
1) Would the DDL "flavor" need to be Teiid-specific (especially for what we
currently call virtual models), and thus still require tooling to convert
metadata/DDL exported from other products to the Teiid flavor?
2) How would we store all of the metadata we currently support (such as
references to external sources, UUIDs, and the numerous properties we see in
Designer for each model element) that isn't part of any DDL grammar?
Thoughts?
JPAV
_______________________________________________
teiid-dev mailing list
teiid-dev(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/teiid-dev