[teiid-dev] VDB metadata consumed by Teiid

[John Verhaeg]

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