Reverse engineering to produce .DDL script

Question

Hi,
Does anybody know the best way to reverse engineer all the tables in a 9i account in order to replicate the .DDL script which would have been used to create the table definitions in the first place.
Also, does anybody know of the best way to similarly produce and ER diagram by reverse engineering either the database account, or the .DDL script which I will gain by acheiving the above.
Thanks in advance
Mark

Answer 1

This can help you a lot:
DBMS_METADATA
With DBMS_METADATA you can retrieve complete database object definitions (metadata) from the dictionary by specifying:
The type of object, for example, tables, indexes, or procedures
Optional selection criteria, such as owner or name
Parse items (attributes of the returned objects that are to be parsed and returned separately).
Optional transformations on the output. By default the output is represented in XML, but callers can specify transformations (into SQL DDL, for example), which are implemented by XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) stylesheets stored in the database or externally.
DBMS_METADATA provides the following retrieval interfaces:
For programmatic use: OPEN, SET_FILTER, SET_COUNT, GET_QUERY, SET_PARSE_ITEM, ADD_TRANSFORM, SET_TRANSFORM_PARAM, FETCH_xxx and CLOSE retrieve multiple objects.
For use in SQL queries and for browsing: GET_XML and GET_DDL return metadata for a single named object. The GET_DEPENDENT_XML, GET_DEPENDENT_DDL, GET_GRANTED_XML, and GET_GRANTED_DDL interfaces return metadata for one or more dependent or granted objects.
This chapter discusses the following topics:
Summary of DBMS_METADATA Subprograms
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96612/d_metada.htm#ARPLS026
Joel Pèrez
http://otn.oracle.com/experts