Hi Neil,

"But when you're using tools like relational databases and ETL, isn't it about time these things provide the needed documentation?"

It is....but the documentation capability of these tools is still pretty 'primitive'. And in most cases you still have to browbeat the programmer to write the documentation into the ETL 'program'.

With DataStage it is possible to load a large amount of 'documentation'

into MetaStage and if you are really smart (like the guy we had on our

project) you can decode the metastage database and get 'documentation'

out of it using SQL....But even this requires enforcing strict coding and naming standards in the jobs to make the 'automatically generated'

documentation useful....you can also access documentation written into the job via web pages.......but the job documentation is written well after the definitions of the mappings have been created....

Even today, I write ETL documentation into a spreadsheet......I don't see that as a big problem because it does not consume such a large portion of the project that having some tool to do it would save that much time...

Best Regards

Peter Nolan

Data Warehousing Consultant

Mobile: +353 879 581 732