Reverse engineer? (1 Viewer)

[deejay_totoro]

Hello,

I wonder if anyone has any advice concerning this subject.

I have just been handed a database with about 50 tables and around 600000 (!) records!

There are no relationships defined (!) in the relationships window - so its very hard to try and decipher what goes where!

Can anyone suggest any ideas on how to go about "getting into" this system. Any software that could guess what the primary key(s) are and maybe help me unravel the table structures?

Thanks!

dj_T

 

[Pat Hartman]

Total Access Analyzer from FMS Inc. (www.fmsinc.com) will help somewhat. Also you might try running the built in Performance Analyzer. My own databases are normalized so I'm not sure what it will tell you but it might give you an idea of which field should be the primary key. The table analyzer will take a spreadsheet like table and split it into a normalized structure. I don't always like what it does but it is a start.

 

[charityg]

Try Tools->Analyzer->Document

If that doesn't give you enough depth, a free trial of Total Access Analyzer will give you more information than you'll probably know what to do with.

http://www.fmsinc.com/free/demos/index.html#Analyzer

 

[charityg]

Beat to the punch!
I've gotta start refreshing before I post!

 

[Pat Hartman]

Nice to see you again. Last time I looked though, the demo for Total Access Analyzer was actually a prebuilt sample documenting Northwind. Have they changed that?

 

[deejay_totoro]

Nw

Well,

Thanks for the replies.

I did download it - and it does indeed seem to be a northwind only demo.

dj_T