Help to document a project

fmartinsferreira · Post by **fmartinsferreira** » Fri May 14, 2004 5:37 pm

I need to document one big project (approximately 450 jobs

)
and I would like to know if Data Stage have this
functionality

, showing source tables that there are in the
job, destination tables, ...

Fernando Martins

kcbland · Post by **kcbland** » Fri May 14, 2004 8:53 pm

MetaStage is useful, checkout the Reporting Assistant in DS Manager, search this forum for those keywords.

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Mon May 17, 2004 8:34 am

The Reporting Assistant leaves a lot to be desired as far as good readable report. The data is in doc_tool.mdb which Reporting Asst uses. I do not know what MetaStage can produce. In the next release there is more coming check here http://developernet.ascential.com/forum ... .php?t=689 .

My product DwNav produces nice easy to read html reports for jobs and will incorporate screen shot gifs or jpegs. It is very fast. The reports in Access are very slow in Rpt Asst. They also overwelms you with information. What you need is which job built which table. I have posted the queries using the doc_tool.mdb to find a job which built a table. My html has a link from a table list in alphabetical order which links to the job document. Each job has a separate html document. It also documents routines. I was thinking about posting the code so you could run it from Access without buying DwNav. It was kind of a last minute addon but seems to be the best part of the product.

I think most developers hate to document and produce bad documentation. If you fill in the long description with things like modification log and restart instructions then the jobs are almost self documenting.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Mon May 17, 2004 4:00 pm

I'd have to disagree that the Reporting Assistant "leaves a lot to be desired" but, to get the most benefit from it, you need to step outside the canned reports that come with it, and develop your own reports. This, in turn, pre-supposes some skill with generating queries and reports in Access, and in understanding E-R diagrams (so that you can use Access relationship diagram to explain the relationships between the tables).
However, if you have all that, you can produce exactly the reports you need.
Except if you want to report on job sequences, since these aren't exported to doc_tool.mdb.

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Mon May 17, 2004 4:48 pm

Ray, I said the data was complete. The reports are what are lacking. The interface is lacking too. It is not intuitive at all.

If you know Access then it is still not easy to get what you need. The underlying tables are not clean either. DSProperties has almost everything in it. There are no job sequences. To get a list table names then you need to run more than one query because it is not all stored in DSProperties or DSLinks. DSProperties has 10 key fields. It does not need all of those. Memo fields would of been nice for routine source code. There are lots of problems with Reporting Assistant. It took me a while to figure out where they stored important information.

They are going to fix all of these in MetaStage and force people to upgrade or buy MetaStage.

Ray, do you really believe Reporting Assistant is representative of DataStage? Do you believe it is a quality solution or easy to use? The information in doc_tool.mdb is very powerful and makes up for the poor user interface.

I think this forum should be based on honest opinions about Ascential's success or failure to bring quality products to the market. New versions of their products have always improved over prior ones but they are a long way from their first version of any product. They are a billion dollar company surely they can stand a little critism from you or me. My sincere hope is they become very dominant. My future is tied to the quality of their products. How con they improve if none of us tell them where their products "leave something do be desired".

vmcburney · Post by **vmcburney** » Tue May 18, 2004 10:06 pm

I think I read somewhere that the reporting assistant is not longer being enhanced, and you will notice it hasn't changed in the last few versions of DataStage, because Ascential want clients to use MetaStage instead. This is nice in theory however I haven't seen much acceptance of MetaStage in the market so DataStage users are left with an ETL repository reporting tool that isn't quite up to scratch.

If you compare Ascential to Informatica I think Informatica are ahead with the Powercenter reporting tool is better then the DataStage reporting assistant and Informatica SuperGlue is better then MetaStage. Ascential have some catching up to do.

fmartinsferreira · Post by **fmartinsferreira** » Wed May 19, 2004 2:16 pm

Ok, the reporting assistant was enough to me.
It is not perfect, can be better, but in my case was enough.
I had 2 problems:
1- I couldn't found the "doc_tool.mdb" file
2 - the reporting assistant do not export the reports to for example a pdf file. But I have Acrobat Professional, that install one type of printer, then was only send the report to print in Acrobat's printer tha it generate a ".pdf" file.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Wed May 19, 2004 4:00 pm

The doc_tool.mdb file is to be found with your DataStage client software in the Documentation Tool folder.
By default (for version 6) this is
C:\Program Files\Ascential\DataStage\Documentation Tool