In this installment I thought I'd write about the exciting, and soon to debut, Toad Data Modeler 3.0 release rather than yet another boring academic or technical topic on data modeling. TDM 3.0 is quite exciting. While it has not yet been made available for public beta – it will be very soon (so please email the product manager John.Pocknell@Quest.com to get signed up). And once you’ve used it – I fully expect that like me, you'll never ever look back. Come along as I demonstrate just the top ten new features that make the upcoming TDM 3.0 release a “no brainer” J

1. Logical Modeling: Toad Data Modeler 3.0 adds full support for logical data modeling! This is a major addition that facilitates both true business and technical modeling needs. Now the user can model their true business requirements and then transform that data model into a perfectly matching technical implementation – without losing any of the business context in the process!

2. Robust Undo/Redo: This may seem like a minor feature, but it’s darn useful – especially after you press autolayout and don’t like the results. Now you can simply choose the Main Toolbar’s Edit menu or press the hot keys. Furthermore, you get to set how many levels of undo & redo to support via the options. This feature is lightning fast – and makes organizing large and complex data models much easier.

3. On-Screen Editing: A very cool and exciting new feature is the ability to do on screen edits of objects. See how below I can easily select the “Customer ID” column in my physical model and simply change it on screen! This is a real time saver. Plus – you can copy, cut and paste items such as attributes and columns across objects – and models too! You just use the standard MS Windows grad-and-drop shortcuts like you do in Windows Explorer. This is a huge productivity enhancer – especially on large models where objects may need to share common items.

4. Changeable Notation – IE & IDEF1X: TDM 3.0 offers the ability to switch display styles between the very common Information Engineering (IE) and IDEF1X, a popular US government standard. This is possible due to a new and flexible architecture within TDM 3.0, so we’ll be able to add other notations as time goes on – possibly even the Oracle CASE tool’s “Barker” notation. Below is an example of IDEF1X display mode. You simply need to open the Main Menu’s “Notation” choice and select which you prefer.

5. Improved Reverse Engineering Wizard: TDM 2.0’s reverse engineering interface did not work well for very large databases due to substantial time delays that were necessary to populate the database object name drop-downs. So TDM 3.0’s reverse engineering wizard was designed from the ground up to work with large collections of objects. Plus it’s more intuitive to boot.

6. Model Comparison & Merge Wizards: New to TDM 3.0 are intuitive yet robust model compare and merge wizards shown below. Modelers will now be able to easily compare and sync-up separate models – with complete visual representations of the key differences.

8. Unlimited Sub-Modeling: Most logical and physical data models these days are quite complex and very, very large. So how does someone organize so much content in a meaningful fashion? With TDM 3.0 you simply create workspaces (i.e. sub models) for whatever organization or grouping you desire. Note that the data model below has four workspaces. The first one is the “All Items” workspace, which simply houses the entire data model. Often this workspace will simply be too crowded to be of much visual value. This model also has three workspaces that are subsets of the “All Items” – and are usually chosen to represent key business, functional or application breakdowns. So here we see that “Borrowing” is a subset we need to split out.

9. View Support – and much, much more: It’s not uncommon to desire the physical data model to graphically show and record the meta-data for many different types of specialized database constructs – such as views. Look at the explorer on the right of the screen shot below. I can see many such objects now – and some even show up on the diagram (and this list will grow over time). Plus each object now has a property edit screen with lots of additional meta-data, like the view properties window shown below.

10. Editable Screens – customize TDM to taste: Have you ever just not liked the way some software’s screen was designed? Wish you could fix it? With TDM 3.0 you can – and it’s really easy. You simply right hand mouse click on the screen you want to change and choose “edit”. Then if you like the resulting screen design you save it – and from then on that’s exactly the way TDM 3.0 will look and feel. Look at the default entity screen below: I did not like the way things were laid out with lots of empty space, and I wanted to add some information of my own for data entry. Voilá, the result is shown below! And it only took me just five minutes to make TDM 3.0 look and feel the way I prefer – which to me is the only correct way (my way) J