February 23, 2010 at 4:50 pm
I have a fairly complicated ERD diagram that is literally a "Spaghetti" mess of lines showing the relationships between tables. While this is reality, I'm looking for a better way to display the database structure to developers.
For example, in Visio, I could reverse engineer the database, number the tables, 1,2,3.. and attach small circles containing those numbers to the sides of other tables. A table with a circled 2 attached to its side would imply that it contains a FK from table 2. I'm simply replacing the lines by attached numbered circles.
Can you suggest a better way to simply the visual aspects of an ERD?
TIA,
barkingdog
February 23, 2010 at 10:28 pm
This is almost certainly a Layout problem. The SOP solution is manual layout (its a big job though).
Other things that you can do:
-- Make the Print Layout bigger so you can spread it out more
-- Remove some "common lookup" or read-only lookup tables
(these are the bane of ERD diagrams because the connect to so
much stuff. Either document them separately, or keep them
on the diagram but remove all of their lines)
-- Make several diagrams that each include only those tables relevant
to a particular subsystem.
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