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Tag: Metadata

Plural Table Name(s)

October 8, 2020 / Matt / Leave a comment
Gears of plural table name

I recently had a discussion with a colleague about the naming of tables and whether or not a plural table name makes sense. The argument for pluralizing had two interesting, competing viewpoints for which I’d like to discuss and give my reasoning why I prefer the singular form.

“A sock drawer contains socks. You wouldn’t label your sock drawer ‘sock’.”

“It’s not a ‘drawer of socks’, it is a sock drawer.”

Two competing arguments for the plurality of naming conventions.

Firstly, I’d like to point out that “socks” is inherently plural as they come in a pair; I would argue that this alone negates the entire conversation. However, I still think it’s a common struggle when naming tables and objects.

The question is: Do you look at a table from a holistic point of view, the collection as a whole, or do you look at it from the view of the records within the table, which make up the collection?

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SAP | BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata Repository

December 31, 2016 / Matt / Leave a comment

For my Business Objects (BOBJ) SAP Data Services (BODS) folks out there, this post will indeed be helpful at some point during your exposure to the ETL tool. You’ll eventually find yourself digging through the Data Services repository trying to locate details about your jobs, reports, or anything that makes your dynamic processing easier. There are loads of forum posts on the subject and even a few nice posts that attempt to make sense of what the schema has to offer. But, there’s one thing that I couldn’t find and am sharing with you today: How to find BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata for your target tables within BODS.

BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata Repository
BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata Repository

In my case, I needed to retrieve the number of rows inserted/discarded/deleted/updated for all target tables within all dataflows within a particular workflow. Since my job routine is divided into workflows, I didn’t need to take the granularity any farther but is certainly possible. Still, in my case, I had the need to retrieve metadata about what my workflow just did with having many dataflows within it all running in parallel. This parallelism introduced the need to dynamically pull these statistics from the repository rather than after each dataflow execution.

Let’s take a look at the query:

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