Reverse Engineering ERD from Database for Documentation

[janh]

Hi there,

we'd like to generate ERD (Entity Relationship Diagrams) by reverse engineering information from Exasols system tables. Does anybody know a tool which provides this functionality? I checked Visual Paradigm https://www.visual-paradigm.com/ but it does not support connections to Exasol DB. 

Are there any alternatives?

I'm grateful for any hint 🙂

Best regards,

Jan

[mwellbro]

and whenever someone mentions DBVis I like to check up on DBeaver ( am I right, @Charlie  ? ).

The TCPH-DDL I found was not quite complete, so the ER isn´t either - plus the FK´s did not get linked automatically....I wonder if that´s just me or there is actually something missing here ?

[Charlie]

The issue with non existing foreign keys is fixed in version 7.1.2 which will be released on 6th of Juli.

I had long going plans for something I know from Toad 

https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/issues/1076

Perhaps I find the time to implement this in the near future.

Regarding the initial question of this thread I would take a look at https://dbschema.com/

[Charlie]

I think this is related to the issue https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/issues/8457

I'm currently busy optimizing meta data query performance so I was unable to fix this.

[exa-Nico]

DBeaver also seems to work well 🙂 

[exa-Nico]

Actually, DBVisualizer can do this. Within the Database Objects, you can open the schema you are using, and then click on "Tables" and choose References (Schema Browser -> click the drop down for your schema, click on Tables (or right click and choose open in new tab), then choose references). This might also only be available with the licensed version of DbVisualizer. I can also save it as an EMF file. Here's a screenshot of the TPCH Dataset from the Public Demo:

Might be something for you to try out using a free trial of DBVis if you don't already use the paid version. Hope it helps!

[janh]

Hi Nico,

thanks for pointing me to DBVisualizer. Actually my initial question is somewhat ill-specified since I'm interested in visualizations of the dependencies of views (ideally down to the lowest level of dependent tables/views). Hence, the term ERD is misleading here.

With DBVis the tab "Dependencies" shows the dependent tables/views, but only in a tabular format and only the first level dependencies.  In case the view itself depends on a view, I'd like to visually present/document this dependency as well.

Best regards,

Jan    

[exa-Chris]

Hi Jan,
would you be willing to share your best practice doing this in an article on the community?
Best regards
exa-Chris

[mwellbro · Accepted solution]

Hi Jan,

now this is where it get´s interesting 🙂 - you might want to look at EXA_DBA_DEPENDENCIES_RECURSIVE , it should give you the referenced objects and you could visualize from there ?

Cheers
Malte

[janh]

Hi Malte,

nice 🙂 I think doing the viz by myself based on that table should do it for now.

Thanks,

Jan

[exa-ThomasB]

@janh   I will ask the DBVisualizer guys if there is an easy way to maybe visualize the Dependencies in that tap in a recursive way.  Looks like a very useful feature.

[mwellbro]

Hi Jan,

I´m not aware of any tools that work "out-of-the-box" in this context, I´ve had reasonable success in using MicroStrategy with a network-visualization but that´s probably a bit to specific to count as advise...
I think there´s ERWIN which probably costs a bit of licence....you could try oracle data modeler... 😉

Cheers
Malte