Copyright 1998, Washington University School of Medicine,
Institute for Biomedical Computing. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself. 

This perl library uses perl5 objects to make it easy to retrieve information
about a particular Sybase ,MS SQL, or Oracle databases's schema.  The database
connection is cached in the schema object. Objects and their fields properties
and index information are retrieved when the schema object is created. Table
relationship information is retrieved for all tables when the first
relationship information is requested. 


Schema information available includes: 

Objects: tables, views, and procedures 
Objects' fields (or parameters) 
Objects' fields' properties: type, length, precision, scale, identity column,
     nullable 
Tables' indexes and primary keys 
Parent => child relations between tables including primary key/foreign key
     equivalences. 
Views' and Procedures' definitions (Comments). 
A view's underlying tables. 


INSTALLATION: 

If you wish to change the location of the schema cache directory from the
default value of '/usr/local/schema_cache', edit Config.pm.

If you wish to add new lower layers or change the search/preference order
for the middlelayes, edit Config.pm.

To install this package, just change to the directory in which this file is
found and type the following: 

        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make test
        make install

and to create the schema cache directory:

	make schema_cache