Customer Reviews

Database Modeling with Microsoft® Visio for Enterprise Architects (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

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This book allows you to make the most of the database modeling aspect of Visio for Enterprise Architects (VEA).
For me finding my way around a new design environment is always time consuming, but following along with the first few chapters made it relatively painless this time. The step-by-step sequences contain not only the usual click this / type that instructions, but often also the reason WHY things are done that way. Sometimes the instructions even anticipate where a newcomer might go wrong. Here is an example from the section that introduces the user interface: "If you unxpectedly get a screen that looks like Figure 3-12 (a screendump with the the menu, toolbar and not much else) you have accidentally hidden the database task pane and should click on View > Task Pane to return to the database menu ...".

The book is carefully organised, and you are guided from a general introduction via installation to the various modeling and reverse-engineering activities, with a nice balance of general duscussion and detailed examples. For complex models there are suggestions on using layers to help with documentation and presentations, and on how to make the most of the built-in reports.
The book shows you how to use the default settings in order to make VEA do as much work for you as possible; it then shows you where and how you can best override the defaults to fine-tune your design. Sometimes a seemingly simple change can have consequences further down the line and the book points out where you have to be careful and why. If you want to go for round-trip maintenance this book helps you to organise your models to make the process as straightforward as possible.

If you are new to Object Role Modeling (ORM) then you will find enough here to show you how powerful it is, and to start using it straight away. If you do not wish to use ORM you can stay with ER models and still be well catered for.

I found the explanation of how conflicts are resolved when you synchronise the model and the physical schema after making changes in one (or both!) of them especially helpful. Being aware of the three-way synchronisation process goes a long way to understand the information presented by the wizards.

There are many useful hints all through the book, like this one: "The physical validation page of the Generate Wizard is the most likely place for errors to occur during DDL generation. Platform specific rules, such as object name lenghth, reserved words, characters, etc, are not enforced during the modeling phase prior to DDL generation. It is thus possible for a model with no conceptual or logical errors to fail physical validation".

The index has been constructed with care, the diagrams are clean and helpful and screen shots are used where appropriate. There is also a handy section with the various ORM, Logical Model and IDEFIX diagram elements.
Best of all, the book opens flat so I can use it while I am working without the need for paperweights, bulldog clips or elbows!

The title is not misleading; you just have to read the whole title. :] Reading the Editorial Review/ Book Description reinforces the title, so you know what you are getting here. Then, you can view the whole Table of Contents right here on Amazon. Finally, you can search the book and read excerpts. In case all of those mislead you, this is a book about using Visio to model databases.

As far as I know, there is no other book that takes on this subject, and this one does a good job of it.

I knew how to draw ER diagrams on paper and with simple diagramming tools, but it's a big leap to getting them drawn in Visio--especially if you want Visio to properly generate a physical model in SQL Server. The book really helps bridge that gap.

The title is very misleading in that the book's main focus is not on Database Modeling but the use of Visio and reverse engineering. There are very generic references to ORM and UML.

The more appropriate title should have been "Microsoft Visio for Database Modeling".

It's a great user's manual for Microsoft Visio for Enterprise Architects.

This book in combination with Information Modeling and Relational Databases: From Conceptual Analysis to Logical Design is a great combo.

I am a huge fan of Terry Halpin, and have tried to use ORM on every one of my projects since I read one his previous books. But I have to say I was disappointed in this book.

This book provides an overview of what ORM is, and how to use Microsoft's database modeling tool to design ORM models.. But it lacks depth. I learned a few small tidbits, which I could have probably gleaned from the newsgroups had I bothered.

This book will probably make it into my box of tax donations pretty quickly.