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The discovery process detects structural information related to entities in database systems and file systems. This includes:

Entities
Attributes
Relationships
Indexes
Comments

It determines which entities (or tables) are present, together with their attributes (or columns) and associated constraints and indexes.
For columns, the following information is discovered:

name
data type
default value
if it is a primary key
if it is an auto increment column (for example an identity)
if it contains unique values
whether or not it is allowed to contain null values

WhereScape 3D contains the following three discovery processes:

Generic discovery - These cannot be viewed or edited. Refer to Generic Discovery for details.
WhereScape defined - These can be viewed using the Discovery method manager tool. Refer to WhereScape Defined Discovery for details.
User defined - These can be viewed and edited using the Discovery method manager tool. Refer to User Defined Discovery for details.

A number of options can be specified when running the discovery process.

One current limitation for file system discovery is that all files being discovered must be in the same format. For example, if the files are delimited, they must all use the same delimiter.