MyEclipse_ER_Designer_Quickstart

MyEclipse ER-Designer Quickstart

Last Revision: January 24, 2006

Outline

1. Preface

2. Requirements

3. Introduction

4. Creating an ER Diagram from a Database

5. Working with an Entity-Relationship Diagram

1. Notation and Presentation Basics

8. Summary

9. User Feedback

10.References

1. Preface

This document was written using Sun JDK 1.4.2, Eclipse 3.1, MyEclipse 4.0 and MyEclipse Database Explorer with a

demonstration Oracle9i server. All screenshots are based upon the default user interface settings for Eclipse,

MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench, and Windows XP. If you experience difficulty with the instruction of this document,

please see the User Feedback section for how to provide feedback to the MyEclipse documentation team.

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2. Requirements

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3. Introduction

The MyEclipse ER-Designer is a maturing feature set that will ultimately enable developers to visually manage the full

life-cycle of a relational database from design, through implementation, and maintenance. The MyEclipse ER-Designer

is the initial public version and its features are limited to providing a visual model of existing databases. The ER-

Designer utilizes the database connectors of the Database Explorer to access a database's metadata as it reverse

engineers the database's entity-relationship (ER) model. From that, the ER-Designer renders the model using the

Information Engineering (IE) System for ER as an entity-relation diagram (ERD). At any time the ER-Designer can

resynchronize an ERD with its database to accurately reflect the current state of the database. The ER-Design includes

a sophisticated table and relationship layout engine that enables it to quickly layout/relayout an ERD.

3. Automatic layout of an ERD table and nodes

4. Export an ERD diagram as a JPEG image

5. Resynchronize individual tables or an entire ERD with its source database

6. Customize the ER-Designer's look and feel

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4. Creating an ER Diagram from a Database

This section demonstrates how to create ERD from an existing database. The example presented uses the Oracle 9i

Human Resources (HR) example database.

1. Open the Database Explorer perspective. From the menubar select Window > Open Perspective > Other... >

MyEclipse Database Explorer

Figure 3. New ER diagram location selection

5. In the New ER Diagram wizard select OK to initiate the database analysis and diagram creation process.

Reverse engineering an ER diagram from a database requires that the ER-Designer download and

analyze the database's metadata. Depending upon the size of your database and the DB server

connection performance, the metadata retrieval process could be time consuming. Therefore you may

choose to run the process in the background by selecting the Run in Background action in the ERD

creation monitor (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Progress Monitor while accessing database meta

Upon completion of the process the new HR.mer file has been created.