Visual Designers in Database Professionals

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Gabriel — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:12:40 GMT

I would love to have a dual view of the ERD (visual and script) similar to the class designer or teh WinForm designer.

I need more annotation and graphical features as in the SQL2005 designer (simple shapes as rectangles, ellipses and lines) to enrich my diagrams for presentations and/or discussions

Tables/Views should be collapsable like classes in the class designer for a better overview.

VSTS Links - 03/19/2007

Team System News — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:09:16 GMT

The Teams WIT Tools Blog on Handling display name changes in Team Foundation Server. Brian Harry on...

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Matthew Krebs — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:17:14 GMT

This is wonderful news! We've been using DBPro in our development ever since it came out and the two most common bellyaches I hear myself and the other DB Developers on my team saying are about the lack of Intellisense and a graphical designer.

We'd be happy just having the designer from SSMS. However, if I wanted to add to that, I'd like the ability to specify naming conventions, perhaps with tokens, so the designer could be customized to fit your coding standards. It already suggests a name for indexes, foreign keys, etc, but they rarely match the standards in every project.

Also, the ability to build a new object by copying another one with all its child objects, then you could just modify a few of the properties, fields or whatever you need for two tables that are very similar.

We also use some home-grown SQL code generators for common tasks. It would be nice if the database Import feature could grab just a few tables and add it to your project rather than trying to create a whole new database.

I think these will greatly help productivity, at least in our environment.

Mairead is looking for feedback on visual designer possibilities

Visual Studio for Database Professionals (aka Datadude) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:45:20 GMT

She's got a blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/mairead/archive/2007/03/16/visual-designers-in-database-professionals.aspx

Visual Designers for Database Objects, time for more feedback.

Euan Garden's BLOG — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:57:09 GMT

Mairead is asking for more feedback here.

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

David Scheidt — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:38:38 GMT

It would be great to bring in the SQL Server diagrams into VS. I'd love to be able to have a better graphical table relationship visualizer. I like the way that one can create many drawing that use the same tables. One thing is that it needs to be two way, though. If I change the table, the diagram should update.

DB Pro is great! Thanks for delivering!

Designers

Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Pros: The What, The Why, The How — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:20:18 GMT

One of the things that I've been most proud of the DBPro team has been our absolutely rabid desire to

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

cra451 — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:58:15 GMT

I have a neat little effective dated (temporal) database that i cannot get relationships to work with.

So if possible can i get views to work as a target in the diagram designer. or even better functions. I have Fk relationships that only appear through the view. Functions already work on Joins in queries and the query designer.

Also dont forget about CTE's

also every time i create a new db in 2005 it asks me if it is ok to create the diagram objects.... How about getting rid of that.

and finally how about a time sensitive "switch" for the database to turn it into a temporal database without me having to code all this?

Cra451

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Steve.S.Walker@gmail.com — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:24:03 GMT

back to the basics...when I click on the "tables", or "views", it would be incredibly useful to be able to then tab over to the summary view and then click, say...the letter "L" and be taken to the tables starting with the letter "L". Currently, that does not work. With a database containing a large number of tables, that is quite important. It's a HUGE pain to have to page down or arrow down....

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Andy Mackie — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:33:27 GMT

Please have Alternate Key as a full concept in its own right. So we have not just Primary Key, but "Keys", which includes both Primary Key and all Alternate Keys. OK, behind the scenes the AK's could create a unique constraint (which the DBMS may enforce with unique index) - but the Alternate Key is the important concept. I just hate the way that most tools seem to ignore AK's and just leave you to create unique indexes yourself.

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

rsocol — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 14:51:33 GMT

One thing you should REMOVE from the view designer (in Management Studio) is the sorting feature. It introduces great confusions regarding TOP 100 PERCENT. You can keep the sorting feature in the query designer, but remove it when designing a view.

Razvan Socol

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

ThomasG — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:06:50 GMT

I was very happy that the DBPro has no visual designer. That ensures that only people with a minimum of database knowledge could design a database.

I experienced in earlier projects that a lot of trouble evolved from people designing the database without proper sql knowledge. This was possible because of the "easy" tools.

My top wish is a proper connection to the Visual studio for architects (i am thinking of a connection in both directions).

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

noocyte — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:28:00 GMT

Oracle support. That's it! :)

The ability to create tables etc. in a higher-level view and then render the Sql for 1:n databases (sql Server and Oracle for us, Db2+OpenSource is nice) afterwards would just be awesome. We're currently using Erwin to do this, but we'd like to use VS.

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Gurb — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:55:37 GMT

As a few others have listed here, make use of the existing designer in VS2005 and SQL Server Management Studio. The current situation where Visual Studio now has two SQL editors is not a good example to follow if the Db Pro Team add another independent designer.

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Matthew Martin — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:46:56 GMT

Steal a feature from SSIS. In SSIS, you point it at a sample csv file and say, "suggest data types" and bing, the table is designed, often almost the way I would have done it by hand. Also, if I wrote sample data before I designed my table, it would be harder to do something boneheaded like pick the dread default of char(10) for every *@#@$%ing column, an antipattern I've seen in production code.

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Jamie Thomson — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:55:25 GMT

Hi Mairead,

When I build objects I build them according to naming conventions. What I would really like to be able to do is define naming conventions (perhaps using a proprietary syntax, perhaps using regular expressions) and then have object names suggested to me.

For example, I'm currently creating new foreign keys in datadude. If I could define that the name of that FK should be FK_<table_containing_foreign_key>_<table_containing_unique_key> then I don't have to type it in myself. That could be one of the value-adds of using datadude over SSMS.

If you want to discuss further - you've got my email address.

cheers

Jamie Thomson

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Grant Fritchey — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:19:02 GMT

Now that you've forced me to type so many of my changes rather than navigate through a gui... I'm finding that I like it. The one issue I run into, without the full .NET style of type-ahead, is that I don't always remember the exact syntax for doing something where I would have simply clicked a check box or picked from a drop-down and I'm forced to go look things up. As hard a problem as it is, I'd rather see you spend time on that rather than incorporating wizards that I find I don't really need.

Thinking about it further, it's easier to type out a table definition rather than have to type a column, tabl to a datatype, scroll through the tab, set the nullability, now move down to the column properties to set one of those... Typing really is faster & easier. Further, since I have a naming standard, if I let SQL Server create the objects for me, I still have to go back & rename them as opposed to getting them right the first time.

By the way, in case you haven't heard this before, you guys built a great tool. Thanks.

Update on Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals

Jeff Lynch [MVP] — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:46:05 GMT

My team has been using VS DBPro (DataDude) for a little over six months now and I thought I give you an update on how we use this tool in a "mixed" environment (SQL Management Studio & DataDude), what we like and what we'd like to see in future releases

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

CE — Wed, 02 May 2007 13:26:10 GMT

Make it possible to add view to the schema desinger and have links between views. Just like Access

Make a better print function

Make a better arrange table function

re: Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Stanley Canepa — Fri, 25 May 2007 17:49:40 GMT

Diagrams -

(a)It would be nice to have a visual representation of all of the tables and to modify the referential integrity graphical.

(b) It would be nice if the diagrams showed more than just tables and their joins. If we could add a SP to the diagram and visually see all the tables, views, and functions it is depended upon. Ditto for views and functions.

Table Designer -

(a) Something very similar to what we have in Management Studio would be good.

(b) Would like to be able to easily toggle between the designer and the TSQL code.

(c) Would be nice to be able to see all the diagrams the table belongs to, and to allow us to open the diagram from the list. Ditto with views, SP, and functions.

(d) Have some sort of tie to the data generator.

SP Designer -

(a) The manual approach always seems best for SP to me; but things like intellisense, auto formatting (customizable rules), and maybe a dependency listing that is easy to get toggle to would be nice.

(b) Again the ability to jump to a table designer straight from the SP would be nice.

View Designer -

(a) Something very similar to what we have in Management Studio would be good.

(b) Would like to be able to easily toggle between the designer and the TSQL code.

Overall I believe a development environment should be easy to jump from point to point. Having the ability to be looking at SP code and double clicking a table in the code (or some other method) to open that table for design is very powerful. Having the luxury to design something visually, but also having the power to very quickly modify it directly in code will save a lot of time. Incorporating intellisense and formatting items to the code editor would save time and produce more uniform code. Being able to pull a listing of objects like you can do in Management Studio would also be helpful, so you can get a listing of all tables quickly find the table we are looking for by starting to type its name.

Visual Studio Team Editon for DB Pro - Mairead's version : Visual Designers in Database Professionals

Dating — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:39:28 GMT

In order to increase developers productivity for creating schema objects traditionally in Visual Studio or SQL Server, you were able to leverage the Table Designer, Check Constraint, Foreign Key, Full Text Index, XML index, index editors and view designer

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