After two years in stealth mode, ActiveFacts is ready for you to try.
This project implements the CQL language for Semantic Modeling. This
enables your data to be designed, expressed and queried in a completely
natural way for the first time. Read more at the ActiveFacts home page:
http://dataconstellation.com/ActiveFacts, or just browse the examples:
http://dataconstellation.com/ActiveFacts/examples/#AllExamples.
This version provides robust SQL generation, with a small skin that
emits
schemas suitable for SQL Server (this skin is less than 3% of the
codebase,
and generators for MySQL and PostgreSQL will follow soon, so please
don’t
hound me!) An option to inject surrogate key fields for use with Rails
will
follow soon.
No query support is available in this release, which is why it’s not
1.0.
However there is a Ruby generator that works with the Constellation API,
so you can generate code that will manage the data your model requires.
In fact, it’s so solid that the CQL compiler actually uses the Ruby code
emitted from it processing the meta-model. Full RDoc is available for
the
Constellation API - it’s easiest to read if you run a “gem server”.
ActiveFacts is a Ruby gem - just say “gem install activefacts”. This
will
install “afgen”, the ActiveFacts generator program. Also installed with
the gem is a directory of example models in CQL; you can immediately
generate these to Ruby or SQL, or edit them to build your own models.
Documentation of the syntax of CQL is provided on the home page, and the
semantics are the same as those of Object Role Modeling, for which
several
books are available.
Clifford H., Data Constellation, http://dataconstellation.com
Agile Information Management and Design.