So… I've ended up in a project, which by far is the worst quality POS I've seen in a long while. It is basically a Visual Basic .NET windows client application used for various administrative tasks and print outs.
It is using inline SQL (concatenated sql-strings of course) and stored procedures all over the place. All reports have their own embedded SQL.
On top of this it is joining in tables from four different databases, two of which is clearly some reverse engineered attempt to integrate two standard systems not meant to be integrated at all.
It's even updating data in these other systems.
OK.
With some sort of hope of a complete rewrite in the near future I'm trying to make sense of this system. My plan is break it down into use cases, and document these from a database/integration standpoint.
Is there, some tool, that's using a SQL-profiler data dump or similar to "reverse engineer" a database diagram. I'd like to see some sort of graphical representation or anything at all to straighten out this spaghetti…
(Or any other ideas or help on how to approach this would be helpful!)
Best Answer
Try Dataedo - it's a database documentation tool that I think can help in your case. You will be able to import multiple database schemas into one repository, then further split them into smaller pieces called modules. You can describe with rich text and create ER diagram for each. You can define missing FKs and use them for the diagrams. You are able to describe every data and program element (table, column, function, parameter etc.) and export such a documentation to PDF document or HTML. Maybe this will straighten out your spaghetti ;)
I'm the product manager of Dataedo.