SQL Server Extract Data Model

Question

Is there a simple way of extracting the database model of existing DBs? I played around in the management studio and in Visio, even though I found very interesting features of data integration I failed to perform a simple export of the structure of the DB.

Could anyone pls give me a hint how to perform such an export, basically I only need the table and view names and their fields in a Visio or Enterprise Architect readable format.

thx in advance

K

Answer 1

First,

thanks guys for the presented hints.

I figured around and found that Visio 2k7 has a pretty easy to use DB reverse engineering functionallity which actually resolved my problem. It works with MS SQL and also with ODBC.

To make it short: Visio ships with the needed functionallity, Enterprise Architect 7.1 has a quite similar functionallity which makes use of ODBC too.

K

Answer 2

Exporting schema is easy with Tasks->Generate Scripts... but wheter you can use it with Visio - no idea.

Answer 3

Select the "Generate Scripts" option from your Object Explorer:

and then make sure to pick "Generate all objects" from the Script Wizard:

This allows you to create a single SQL file to create the whole database, and at least Visio Enterprise is able to reverse-engineer a database from a SQL script.

Marc