BatchFlow: a method and notation to visualize RDBMS batch jobs

  • Authors:
  • Ananth Kendapadi;Matt Gandolfo;Amitosh Shukla

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In a typical IT division of a large enterprise, there are a significant number of batch jobs that process data in relational database systems and flat files. These jobs may range from those that are run once in a year to those that are run every hour or every few minutes. While there are many notations available to represent a relational database schema including the ER model [1], it appears that there is no good visual notation to represent the jobs themselves. To some extent, this problem can be addressed by using flowcharts, UML sequence diagrams, and operations summary matrix. However, these notations and representations do not leverage the fact that most of the operations in a batch job are usually a relational select/insert/update/delete operation on a relational table, or a read/write operation on a file. In this paper, we introduce a method and notation that we call BatchFlow. This notation can help organizations in visualizing and communicating the batch job designs at a high level.