- Microsoft Visio Database Reverse Engineering
- Microsoft Visio Database Reverse Engineering
- Microsoft Visio Database Reverse Engineer Roles
Microsoft Visio 2010 Reverse Engineering Database Diagram; Database Reverse Engineering Visio 2019; The database reverse engineering code was removed in Visio Professional 2016 because of some issues, but it was announced late last year that it will be returning this year. Visio Professional makes it easy to extract information from a DBMS and add it to the drawing page. The Reverse Engineering Wizard walks you through the steps required to connect to a data source, specify a DSN, connect to a target database, and select the objects to extract from the database. How to reverse engineer a schema from Oracle into Visio. How to reverse engineer a schema from Oracle into Visio. There are some issues with Visio not being updated to support newer SQL server versions. Try the following: Start 'reverse engineer' wizard; Select Generic OleDb data provider (not the 'Microsoft SQL Sver'). The dialog pops up, select SQL Native Client there, then (on the 'Connection' tab) your server, and your database. I have Visio 2016 professional installed, which by all my research should support database reverse engineering. Every guide I find says to go to the Software and Database category and select 'Database Model Diagram' for the Database tab to pop up with the option for reverse engineering. The Visual Studio tool contains an import feature that allows the existing schema to be converted into a database project. In short, this feature uses reverse engineering to create T-SQL files for each object in the database. Visual Studio will work with both a Microsoft SQL Server database and an Azure SQL database. Business Problem. It is however, an extremely tedious task to manually build a database diagram having gone through the individual tables and views etc. Visio has the functionality to reverse engineer a database for you with minimal effort. This means that it will automatically take the database you give it and create a database diagram of all the tables and fields.
Microsoft Visio Database Reverse Engineering
There are times when you want to get a graphical representation of a relational database (say, for instance, the Citrix Resource Manager Summary Database). You could wade through a DBMS management console (such as the Microsoft’s Enterprise Manager for SQL) to get a list of all the tables and primary key/foreign key relationships, then draw out these tables in some kind of graphics software. Or, you could use Microsoft Visio to do all this work for you. All you need is an ODBC connection and Microsoft Visio Professional.
- Open Microsoft Visio Professional and create a new Database Model Diagram.
- Click on the Database menu and select Reverse Engineer to start the Reverse Engineer Wizard.
- Select an existing data source (DSN) or create a new one.
- Select the information you want to add to the drawing. (I chose just the tables, primary keys, and foreign keys in this example).
- Select the checkboxes for the tables (and views, if any) that you want to graph.
- Select whether you want Visio to add the shapes to the drawing. If you don’t let the wizard add the shapes to the page now, you will be able to drag and drop the shapes onto the drawing after the wizard finishes extracting the information.
- Review the selections made and click Finish.
I used the steps in the example demonstrated above to extract the Citrix Resource Manager Summary Database schema. As you can see from the screen shot below, Visio did a great job of extracting the information, but you’ll have to do quite a bit of moving shapes around to get a better picture of the relationships. Fortunately, I’ve already done this for you, and you can download the drawing in the Downloads section here.
Microsoft Visio Database Reverse Engineering
(Click for a larger version)
One last really cool thing. You can also use Visio’s database features to generate databases from a drawing as well as update databases from a drawing. I often reverse engineer a database, make changes to the drawing, and let Visio make the changes to the database for me. That way my documentation and database structure stay in synch.