Ever seen a table with so many columns you wonder if the designer had fallen out of the de-normalization tree and had hit every branch on the way down? Oracle currently allows a max of 1,000 columns per table. Please do not test this limit. Maybe you do need that many columns, but I doubt it.

If you were to visualize this data model, imagine how easily you might be overwhelmed with all the white-noise, or extra information.

In an earlier post I advocated using SubViews to alleviate the headaches you get when working with many hundreds or thousands of entities.

Well maybe you only have several dozen entities but the number of attributes is overwhelming.

So just hide them

A new feature in v3.1 – now in Early Adopter Release – allows you to auto-hide attributes that don’t meet the following requirements:

Just show me the 'important' stuff

Model TMI

Modeling TMI? There's a medicated cream for that.

The Goldilocks View

After you apply the model view options, the ‘extra’ attributes/columns will be hidden. However, the entity objects in the diagram will still be REALLY big. So just right-mouse-click and use the ‘Resize objects to visible’ call.

Ah, that feels so much better! And my eyes thank you SQL Developer!

What else is new in v3.1 and where can I go get it?