Teiid Designer as modeling tool?
As you probably already know, we have extensive experience using Teiid as a data virtualization engine. As our project matures, we are moving into the world of modeling. In particular, we want to produce a common resource model mapped from our physical sources exposed through OData and described in CSDL. As I read through the Teiid OData support doc, I see that the odata war file maps Teiid metadata constructs into the appropriate CSDL constructs. I have very little experience with Designer, but from the docs, I see it allows the user to annotate physical sources with Teiid metadata so I assume that between the metadata surfaced automatically from translators and manual intervention through Designer, the odata war will have access to enough metadata to populate CSDL pretty completely.
We have needs to express additional metadata on top of the base CSDL stuff - mostly application level metadata. I know that Odata v4 allows extensions to CSDL and Teiid doesn't support v4 yet. Do you see Teiid Designer growing into a full-featured modelling tool? No, I don't really know what "full-featured" means but some ideas come to mind:
- A live, REPL-like environment where the user can see data from physical sources, immediately receive feedback on their modeling/metadata decisions and issue queries (probably either SQL or OData queries) to quickly iterate through the code-test-debug cycle
- Defining extensions to CSDL within Designer
- A unified model can be physically encoded into multiple source artifacts to facilitate multiple authors working on different pieces of the model and to fit source control systems more cleanly (as an aside, perhaps this can already be achieved by smartly dividing the model into multiple VDB xml files and using Teiid's VDB import functionality)
I'm pretty sure Designer isn't there yet. That's fine. I'm mostly curious about direction and fit to this purpose.
