Eclipse-Editor for data warehousing metadata with EMF

April 02, 2006

When i first heard of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) i got really excited, i tried it out and i wanted to use it.

And i had a problem at hand: For my daily work as a BI/DWH consultant i needed some metadatabase which keeps tracks of database tables, file structure defitions and load/unload script definitions and which keeps tracks of changes and automatically generates new scripts if a column in a table or a field in a file is changed.

So i started to defined the model in Ecore and i changed the automatically generated Editor of EMF, so that there are two different views on the data structures which are shown in the next two screenshots.

Remark: This article was written in 2005. Therefore the screenshots show an old eclipse version.

Now i am able to define, persist and change the definitions, for example a file ...

or an import, export or transformation mapping ...

because i wrote code for the Java Emitter Templates (JET) library and the scripts are generated automatically or by pressing a button as in the following two screenshots.

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