Let’s say you have a schema you want to reverse engineer and generate some docs. Lo and behold, the developers used foreign keys! But…there are so many of them, I can’t see the forest for the trees. So how do we make this simpler? Well, our developer for the Data Modeler showed me this trick: In his words: when use …
The Quickest Way to Reverse Engineer Your Database to a Model
You have a schema. Someone else built it. You’ve just inherited it. Now you need to build an application around it. But, tell me more about this schema? No docs? That’s OK, you can build your own! 1. Connect to Your Database, Open a ‘Driving’ Table By driving, I mean one that’s likely to be at the ‘center’ of your …
Enforcing Naming Standards for Your Data Models
Customer asks: We tried also to apply some naming conventions but I think we didn’t understand something…. Having a logical model with a table having the column X, and a glossary having the standard name as Y. Can I apply some checks based on the glossary directly in the logical or relational model? Yes, in fact you can. Basically how …
Modeling JSON in Oracle Database Tables
Having an extra bit bucket in your tables is pretty easy now in Oracle Database 12c and higher. We offer native JSON support [JSON DOCS] – you can have a free form text column and store anything you want in it. AND, we pretty much give you the full power of the SQL interface to those bit bucket items – …
Generating a Data Dictionary Report and Diagram for a SubView
Your relational models can get big. Bigger than the human mind can easily consume. So instead of generating a report of 2,500 objects, you might want to break down your model to smaller chunks, AKA SubViews. So let’s open the reports, which you’ll find on the main File menu. First, we don’t want the main diagram in the report, that’ll …
Data Modeler: Foreign Key Create New Column vs Use Existing
When using the data modeler, we assume when you add a foreign key, you haven’t already created the ID column. So we create that for you. Here’s what that looks like. I draw the relationship. I don’t want that. I want it to use USER.USER_ID instead. Click on the Column, and toggle it to USER_ID. When I click ‘Apply’ or …
User Defined Properties in SQL Developer Data Modeler
There are tons of properties you can set in your design objects. In fact, I discovered a ‘new’ one this week thanks to my friend David. #Oracle #SQLDev Data Modeler users please up vote my feature request to allow additional “display as” componentshttps://t.co/2fIbVXmIn9::: — david schleis (@dschleis) October 12, 2016 Display as…what’s he talking about? Oh, this. But what if …
Designing Foreign Keys, PT II
I say designing, because I’m going to be talking about how to do this in SQL Developer Data Modeler. And I say Part Two, because in a previous post I showed how to draw a foreign key in your relational design. This post discusses how to control the generation of the foreign key column: to generate or not if generated, …
SQL Developer Data Modeler: Adding Journaling Tables
You may want to audit or ‘journal’ changes to your data. As you update a record, add a record, or delete a record – log that change in a different table. When doing your designs in the Data Modeler, you can ask at the time of DDL generation to have the journaling table and trigger created for one or more …
Aligning Objects in your Data Modeler Diagrams
Kris (no, not THAT Kris) asks… Is there some sort of ruler that is built into this software? If not, is there some way to select a table and then specify X and Y coordinates so that I can top left align all of the diagrams that I’m creating. Currently, I am zooming in and switching between diagrams to top …