>>You might want to be careful doing this, the other contractors may consider this privileged or proprietary intellectual property. For example, what is there now may be your client's database, plus other proprietary data structures for development or testing that may not be part of the deliverables. If you extract the latter you could be in a lot of hot water.
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>Hi Al,
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>So far the development team has been extremely evasive when it comes to giving my client a diagram or any documentation pertaining to the database.
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>This project is at a critical stage as we don't even know if we should go into "damage control" mode or not and can't decide because we have no information in order to make ANY decision.
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>There is a chance that they consider it proprietary information, but they haven't said so yet. All they keep telling my client is "yea yea yea" and in the meantime they give him nothing.
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>My take on this: it's a bad situation about to get worse, but I must give something to my client.
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>Thanks for your help!

Sounds like you're between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Regardless of the exact circumstances, it sounds like you're about to dig into the DB schema without approval from the other contractors. For peace of mind I'd get legal ducks in a row beforehand:

- Find out if you have explicit permission to do so
- If you don't, ask the other contractors for permission (it might be a good idea to do so IAC)
- If they won't give permission, ask your client to indemnify you if they expect you to actually do the investigation on their behalf. This should only be a final step; bear in mind such an indemnification may still not protect you from a lawsuit.

Normally, in a situation like this I'd try to talk to them "off the record" - unfortunately, this works only if they perceive you as being reasonably "neutral". What you might find is (for example) that they have a design, but something has come up e.g. the DBA they planned to have implement the DB has taken another job, etc. so there may actually be nothing currently in place. If it's something like this, it's really just embarrassment, which can usually be resolved without too much hardship to anyone.

OTOH, if they are way behind on design or don't have the skills to do the job, then there's certainly cause for concern.

Of course, if you and/or your client consider the contractors "evasive", that's a major concern in its own right. It's a corollary of honesty - you have a right to timely and accurate project updates. If you haven't already, you need to tell them that you consider their "evasiveness" to be a problem, and that "bad news" is preferable to "no news".