Tool to automate DER creation

Hi all,

I know this topic might not be best suited for this forum, but maybe you can give me some pointers. I am trying to automate the creation of DER diagrams of the databases living in the production server, in order to publish them on a web page. I want to run this every night so that all developers have access to the latest version of the DER.

Have you come up with a tool that can help me do this?

Any ideas?

 

Thanks a lot and please excuse my posting to a BI forum

Felipe

In theory could use Visio to do this but like this thread ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1890109/automating-reverse-engineer-database-model-with-visio ) states, if you're having to generate ERD nightly then you're doing something wrong.

Maybe they like to keep their developers on their toes. Is the table there or not? Did we rename the columns? You never know. Its living life on the edge.

I know this shouldn´t have to be this way. But I want to create a process to automate the documentation process, because, as the production support area is not the greatest, sometimes the documentation esseveral months (and releases) old.

 

Thanks to both of you

 

Felipe

Felipe, we apologize if the answers came off as snarky, didn't mean it that way. It's just typically you don't see need for ERDs to be generated nightly. Another avenue you may want to explore is using Pragmatic Works' BIDocumenter tool: http://pragmaticworks.com/Products/Business-Intelligence/BIDocumenter/Default.aspx

You can download a trial copy and you can actually schedule snapshots to be taken of databases you wish to document. Your output options are pretty numerous. If you want you can have it output the CHM format and link it to a page on your intranet and they can pull that down. Here's an example of the output of the product: http://pragmaticworks.com/downloads/BIDocumenter/BIDocumenterSample.zip 

If you need any more help please let us know, thanks.

by no means i thought the comments snarky...

 

thanks for the bidoc tip, i'll tri it