NORA
Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis

The fragmented nature of Relational Data makes it difficult to recognize related information, much less manipulate the data to extract meaningful information. The referential integrity of the data must remain intact, yet must extract every possible database relationship. Complete intelligence about data relationships is non existant and must be "discovered" by the analysis program. The real-world data relationships are delibertly buried in the database data and but be extracted by the application logic, and understood and interpreted.

Analyzing data relationships to improve accuracy and data integrity A NORA - Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis base analyzer provides the capabilities to discover, record, refine and manage groups of database tables and relationships that support a single case or an entire investigational area. Nora provides a complete view of database relationships, essential for planning application upgrades, initiating database and data relationship changes, enhancing or adding new application functionality, as well as database cleanup, migration and testing. Now you can discover and save the database relationship information as “groups” and manage these relationship groups across your enterprise application environment.

The Group Discovery process enables finding the database relationships based on a user-defined set of parameters. For example, you can specify a starting point table, boundary objects, tables and relationships to ignore, and additional relationships to find. The discovery process can be run to analyze the entire database catalog or discover the relationships specific to a selected starting point table. You can also take advantage of the group validation feature to compare one version of a table/relationship group to another to determine if any changes have occurred in the DBMS environment or in the applications that reference the tables in the groups.

For example, you need to add a recorded radio transmission table to a survalence application and you want to see the impact that change will have on the other tables. You can use the group discovery process to obtain a before and after view of the database and then perform a group validation to automatically pinpoint the differences. First run the group discovery process on the original database to get a baseline. Then add the recorded radio transmission table to the database and run the group discovery process again to get a current version and view of related groups. Next, select that new version to compare to the baseline. The differences display automatically.

The capability to discover and understand the data relationships within a single application or across integrated applications offers several benefits. The capability to find table relationships can help you perform impact analysis across databases before deleting or modifying database elements, for example, renaming table columns.