Hi guys. I'm playing around evaluating the DDT at the moment.



The DDT does not seem to provide any way of creating triggers. One area where triggers are useful is in the enforcement of cardinality on a relationship. For example, a parent must have one and only one child, or perhaps between one and three children, but no more or less, etc.



Assuming that you use the DDT with your own apps, do you ignore triggers completely and implement things like cardinality in the business objects? For that matter, do you write any SQL at all (such as stored procedures for reports), or do you do it all in the .NET application?



The help file for the DDT is a little bit light on at this stage. For example, there is nothing on deployment packages or how to create and use them. Similarly for the steps required to update an existing database with a new version, something which the DDT is touted to be able to do.



The import function is very limited. I pointed it at an existing SQL Server 2005 database and only got the tables. No foreign key contraints, no unique key constraints, no indexes, no descriptions, no triggers and no stored procedures.



At the moment it is difficult to see what I would use the DDT for. The fact that it lacks any kind of diagram tools is also a big minus. I currently use CASE Studio 2 for designing my database schema, and while it may rely on scripts, it works and is very flexible, including ER diagrams, HTML reports, generation of RI triggers, and support for a multitude of databases.



The DDT has potential, but I think it is currently way too underdeveloped. Maybe you've got big plans for it that we will see in the future?



Regards,

Bruce