When a development team is developing a system that requires accessing a database, it is a common practice to setup local databases on each of the development environment and populate them with all the required schema of the system so that developers can develop and test the function they implement with test data in their own database, rather than working with actual data with production database.
Visual Paradigm supports data modeling with ERD and a set of engineering features like the reverse engineering and generation of database. The features are related with each other. For example, you may generate a database from physical ERD. In order to construct a data model that helps you build a database properly, you need to name the entities and their columns properly. Besides, data types of columns should be well-considered. Just to take the type ‘char’ example, there are quite a number of similar types like varchar, varchar2, nvarchar, etc. If a wrong type is chosen for any column, you may get data corruption or result in data lost.
Visual Paradigm supports all the data types you can find in any supported database management system (DBMS). You can select any data type you want for columns when drawing ERD. As the supported data types vary depending on the target version of DBMS, you need to set in the database configuration page the version of DBMS you use. With this, Visual Paradigm can list out those supported types, preventing you from selecting a non-supported type, which result in producing an inaccurate data model.
In this article, you will learn how to find out the version of your MySQL installation. Try to follow the steps get the information needed, and select the proper version range in the database configuration window of DB-VA/VP-UML/SDE. Read more »
When defining class model for your persistent layer, a class is defined as part of the static data model instead of controller or user interface items. And the class is directly mapped to table(s) in your database. As the class is mapped to tables, its attributes is also mapped to columns in table. In order to make the mapping work, you have to model attributes with primitive types like integer, boolean, String, etc. You cannot model the attribute as any other types which are not compatible with database.
To overcome this, you can make use of ORM User Type to define customized datatype for attributes, and persistent its value into database. This article will teach you how to use ORM User Type. Read more »