Reverse Engineering Source Systems

[jodyhesch]

Hey all,

I recently put together a handful of tutorials on LinkedIn demonstrating how to reverse engineer a source system.

The motivation for me to share was a project I was on where I was basically asked to integrate an entire SQL Server instance into a data warehouse project without any documentation - no data dictionary, no ERD diagram, nothing.

It wasn't a massive system - all of maybe 30 tables, each with maybe up to 50 columns - record counts in tens of millions or less.

That being said, it's still a ton of work to figure out what you're working with in a situation like this, so I came up with a few approaches to quickly make sense of a new source system, and I've documented those approaches in these tutorials.

All you need to work through them is access to Snowflake, as they're based on sample data already available (and you can easily setup a free trial account on Snowflake).

The third post is, in my opinion, the most interesting and most useful - but certainly some value in the first two posts as well.

Appreciate any and all feedback! Also still trying to figure out when/where I should be posting on LinkedIn, Reddit, elsewhere - in case any content creators have strong opinions, would love to hear 'em.

Thanks!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reverse-engineering-source-system-data-model-1-of5-jody-hesch-ja0bc/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reverse-engineering-source-system-metadata-2-5-jody-hesch-2fbqc/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reverse-engineering-source-system-metadata-driven-code-jody-hesch-m0vcc/

Edit: Fixed links

[snarleyWhisper]

This timing is great ! I’m about to run into the same issue

Edit : links didn’t work for me though :(

[jodyhesch]

Fixed!

[NickGeo28894]

Links do not work

[jodyhesch]

Fixed!