Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development
Database Design Principles in Progress Dynamics
With Progress Dynamics™, you do not need to redesign your database before building an application for that database. Redesign might be required for business reasons, but dynamics itself can work with legacy designs if required. Progress Dynamics facilitates rearchitecting existing applications to make them more distributed with n-tier architecture. The goal is creating an application that runs in a graphical distributed environment with a number of different interfaces, while retaining much of your existing business logic. The rearchitected application should also work with existing 4GL reports and other programs that execute on the server. The framework is designed, as much as possible, not to require you to redesign or modify your existing database to support a gradual migration strategy.
However, there are Progress Dynamics design conventions that can provide substantial benefits if you are defining a new database, whether for a brand new application or to modernize an existing database. If you are in a position to make extensions to an existing database, you can make use of these conventions to provide guidance on how to extend it. For example, there are fields you might add to the database tables to make your data more accessible to the framework.
There are design principles that are applicable to most databases. This chapter does not cover all principles of relational database design. Instead, it discusses the aspects of relational design that are especially important to success with Progress Dynamics. Reviewing these principles might help you determine whether redesigning a legacy database is a better course than struggling to bring it forward to a new generation of applications.
This chapter describes some basic principles of database design that you should understand to use the Progress Dynamics framework successfully. Some of these are fairly universal, but some have to do with specific aspects of the framework. It includes the following sections:
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