Carts Before Horses
I have just started supporting a new client. We’ll call this client Client B. Client B did a pilot of DOORS, then a few months later hired a some consultants a month or so before…
DOORS
DOORS
Posts about DOORS from the Baselines blog.
White Papers Galore
For those of you who couldn’t attend the US 2007 UGC conference, I thought I would pass along some information that was provided to those who did. Telelogic has posted the white papers from this…
DOORS Link Modules – Explained!
One thing that really confuses new DOORS adminisrators is link modules. When I say that DOORS is not Access, one thing that makes DOORS different than other databases is link modules. I think Telelogic, both…
DXL Tutorial – Part I
I’ve seen a few DXL guides in my day, and I’ve seen a lot of DXL snippets, but I’ve never seen an in-depth DXL tutorial. I’m writing this to help plug a gap in the…
DOORS Is Not Access — Part II
In my last entry I explained the concept of a public database. DOORS is a public database. Access is semi-public, as an Access developer can take steps to expose or hide the database from the users, where Oracle is usually intended to completely backend all data. Users don’t really go into an Oracle database and poke around.
This isn’t true for DOORS. When DOORS is used as anything other than a repository, users can usually see more than they absolutely need to. This makes DOORS different from other databases.
Let me illustrate my point with a story.
DOORS Is Not Access – Part I
It is my sincere hope that one day, someone who has just been tasked to administer DOORS for their company and who knows nothing about DOORS will come across this entry and think a little bit before jumping in head first.
Merriam-Webster defines a database as “a usually large collection of data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval.” In this sense, DOORS is a database. There is a DOORS server, with organized data that can be accessed by clients.
But just because DOORS is a database, that does not mean that it’s just like every other database. And I’m not talking about the difference between, say, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Or even Access and Oracle. Yes, Access and Oracle are vastly different, but all of the database servers/tools listed above have one thing in common: most of the time, the customers of the data they house never see the structure of the database.
