Relational DB Model for an Engineering applicaiton

I'm not sure where to post this - but, I'm a DBA trying to do some modeling for a client developing an Engineering applciation.

There is a lot of interaction at the application layer between external systems and the database - I'm trying to find some ideas or templates of how others designing for a similar functionality did this.

THere are real-time displays for engineering equipment where the database must interact with different states of the equipment. The user enters search criteria for data stored in the database, and results and real-time attributes are displayed.

THis seems to be similar to a manufacturing model, but I'm struggling. I'm used to doing models for OLTP or business reporting databases. Part of the problem may be that there doesn't seem to be a good way to translate relational concepts to engineers. There are a lot of requests for bit fields.

Can anyone reccomend a reference I might look at to get some ideas on how to mesh the modeling of external processes with the database? A simple flow model doesn't seem to work (either technically or as a communication tool - I'm not sure which)

If you posted this on data mining zone I think you cant do he following things according the field:

If you can track this interaction "at the application layer between external systems and the database" you ca analyze this collected data and find some commonly behaviors of your sistems. Let's think at all the customers'bill in an retail magazine:these can say what customers like to buy.

In your case you can know:

- what' happend time to time at with these interactions;

-the links between differents states of equipments and differents real-time attributes .

After finding the behaviors follow predicting future situations.

|||

We used Winform WireFrame application with a reporting component that includes reports with the engineering diagrams, the most important thing we had access to at least ten engineers who look are what we have done and make corrections. The database used only concatenated natural keys and we the developer cannot create table and columns but we have DBO permissions. This is a fortune 10 company and we were rewriting an existing application for a new project it will be a lot of work and many developers, at one time we were about 15 just writing code.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/wireframe_annotations_in_visio_special_deliverable_11