SQL Data Modelling/Mapping Software for 200+ Tables

Question

I'm looking for what I think is called a data modeling program to map out all of our SQL Server tables (200+) into a large, poster-size image. We've put all of our legacy application tables into SQL Server 2005 and my boss is looking for a snazzy way of viewing the data... basically something to say "this is what we maintain".

I've seen some very big database books for different companies over the years, but nothing like what I'm looking for now. I have downloaded a program called ModelRight and it does the re-engineering, but it seems to be limited to about 70 tables... after that the tables start stacking on top of each other. Enterprise and legacy applications can have massive databases so this idea can't be new, but I cannot find anything to do what I'm looking to do.

Of course open-sourced applications would be the best, but enterprise-level databases will probably cost enterprising-level cash! Has anyone ever done anything like this and what did you use? Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Entity-Relationship diagrams are what you are looking for.

ERwin diagrams are nice. (I don't work for them but I've used them in the past.)

Answer 2

The best method I have found for doing this is to use Office Visio Professional 2007. It will reverse engineer the schema (note only the Professional version does this), and then you can experiment with how the tables get layed out using various different layout algorithms. Once that is done you can color-code different logical areas and add annotations as you wish. It will let you print out on tabloid-sized paper or larger, and exporting to PDF is always an option.

It will work with any ODBC-compliant db provider.

Answer 3

There are a number of products that do this:

• SQL Modeler (from Sybase Database studio)
• ERWin
• Visio
• System Architect
• Eclipse plus the ER Modeler plugin
• Sql Server Management Studio 2005 and 2008 supports ER models and can auto generate the diagram from a database (although it's up to you to lay out the diagram sensibly)

Here is a site that compares a large number or ER Modeling tools

If you have Visual Studio Team System Database edition you can reverse engineer that database into an Entity Model.

Answer 4

My favorite, by far, is Enterprise Architect. I find it far superior to Visio in terms of modeling, and I've used it for systems containing around 50 - 70 tables. Here's a very simple sample diagram.

Answer 5

dbscript generates data diagrams as png's. See the samples named "Data Diagram ..." here.

Not sure if that's what you are looking for.