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Reverse Engineer

You can reverse engineer a database or script file to create a physical or logical/physical model based on the captured information.

After the reverse engineer completes, you use the standard tools and dialogs to add new database objects, create system documentation, and redesign the database structure based on your requirements.

The majority of the information that you reverse engineer is explicitly defined in the physical schema. However, reverse engineer also derives information from the schema and incorporates it into the model. For example, if the target DBMS you select supports foreign key declarations, identifying and non-identifying relationships and default rolenames for the data model are derived during reverse engineering.

You can derive all the major model information except subtype relationships, since they are not currently supported by any SQL DBMS. However, the target databases vary in the amount of logical data model information that is included in the physical schema. For this reason, the resulting models can vary depending on the target database selected. You can also infer some logical information, including primary and foreign keys and table relationships, based on table index definitions or column names.

You can include or exclude RI triggers in the reverse engineer process. If you selected to treat RI triggers as model objects in the Model Properties dialog, RI Defaults tab, or used the forward-engineering option to include RI triggers in the schema, you can choose to include or exclude these options during reverse engineer.

When you reverse engineer a database, you can set a trace file to record the database queries. You can review the queries executed against the database after the reverse engineer completes.

More information:

Inference Table for Reverse Engineer

Save Database Queries to a Trace File

Set Options for Reverse Engineer