When we started using StrataFrame for our redevelopment project we intended on starting with a fresh database design. (I know Trent was involved with many of the discussions and made some excellent suggestions). The final decision has been made and we decided to develop against our legacy database for the core components, which is not ideal, but it was a business decision we had to make and the reasons made sense for the size of our install base and the companies future direction.

Some background...The database was converted to MS SQL from Pervasive Btrieve, and the design and structure is not ideal. The tables lack relationships and primary key values and a lot of the field types are Char when they should be DateTime, Boolean etc...  Fortunately the DDT and Business Object mapper enables us to work around these issues quite nicely so we are dealing with the correct types within the .NET code.

The structure is another issue. Right now one of the problems I am trying to solve is how to deal with multiple tables for the same type of data or data that is duplicated in multiple tables. A long time ago Btrieve had maximum sizes for record length or something like that... so once the maximum was reached a new table was created. Example: I have two tables for customer information (One to One relationship).

My question is this... With StrataFrame, is it possible to create a business object structure using our 'ideal' data model, which we hope to migrate to one day, and have this business object maintain the two physical tables, so when we refactor the database we don't have rewrite a lot of code. (we are using the ddt for structure but not using it for deployment of our legacy structures). Keeping in mind we still want to take advantage of all the StrataFrame data binding, broken rules....etc

Is there another approach we could use?  I'm open to any suggestions.

Thanks

Tim