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.
In relational database, records are identified by a unique value. We call this value the primary key. Some databases allow to control how this unique value is being generated by defining the sequence. In this article, we will show you how to model the sequence with Visual Paradigm and use as the ID Generator for your database tables.
The reverse database tool of VP-UML provides a handy approach to instantly convert a relational database into an ERD, to aid in the studying of database structure, entities properties and their inter-relationships.
Being able to study a database with an ERD is great because ERD is so easy to read and understand. However, the relationships among entities may increase the complexity of diagram when there are many entities and are highly coupled. If you just want to focus on seeing the database tables and their columns, but not pretty much interested in their inter-relationship, you can optionally form an ERD database diagram with solely entities, without including their relationships. In this article, you will see how to form an ERD from a MS SQL database, with just entities showing in the diagram. You will also learn how to optionally show the relationships.
