[teiid-dev] VDB metadata consumed by Teiid

[Alex Miller]

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 at redhat.com>
> To: teiid-dev at 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
> 
> 
> 
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