Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Reverse Engineering a Physical Model Diagram

I recently wrote about a logical diagram with Redgate Data Modeler. That was interesting, but creating all the objects is a pain. I decided to try creating a physical diagram from an existing database. This post looks at the experience.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Data Modeler.

Getting Started

As with the logical model, I right click and choose New document.

Then I get a list of options. I’ll choose the middle one, Physical Model. This is what I mostly need to work with an existing system. Since I don’t often move models from one platform to the other, a physical diagram can work well for me.

Once I click next, I get a list of platforms, and I need to enter a name. I’ve done that. Notice that when I select SQL Server, I can alter the drop down for different versions of SQL Server.

Below this, I see a source box, and a file picker.

I need a file.

I’ll go to SSMS and right click my database. I’ll find the Generate Scripts task, as shown below.

I go through the wizard and mostly pick defaults.

I do script to one file, not separate ones. I choose all objects.

Back to Data Modeler with the file. I select this and upload it and see…an error.

When I open the script, I see lots of non-database stuff.

I’ll delete this stuff and also a bit at the bottom. I rename this to Westwind.sql, which is what I am importing. Then I was able to import the file and when I clicked “Start modeling”, I ended up with this:

Redgate Data Modeler (RDM) has detected quite a few relationships. You can see them in the diagram for the explicit ones defined. If I click one, such as the Order to Order Details item, I can see on the right that this is for OrderID in both tables..

One thing that threw me slightly was two Employees tables. I was wondering what was going on here, but when I clicked the lower one and looked through properties, I can see that this is for a different schema. I wish this were more visible, but it did get detected.

Cleaning up the Design

One of the things I like is that I can set areas in the model. This lets me organize things and even convey information to developers and others that work with the database.

At the top left, I have a series of icons. The last one on the right is the New Area icon. I’ll click this.

I can now draw an “area” somewhere. Notice the right when I do this. I have properties for this area.

I’ll add a name and change the color, which gives me way to easily see this area in my diagram. I’ll also drag in the Auditing.Employees table, as this is what I want people to know.

I can select this and move it (look at the video) and then I see this as a part of my diagram, but clearly separate from other parts. Developers can learn the light red is the auditing schema, which is separate from the rest of the diagram.

I can add other areas, not just for schemas, but for separating out parts of my database. Often I have a series of entities that I care about, or want to cluster together, and having areas with colors lets me separate these out.

I might run out of colors in a large database, but I could use lots of pale blues or grays to separate out areas, each of which has a name. That can be helpful to reduce the complexity of the model.

Adding a New Table

I can also add a new table if I want. One of the icons at the top is for new tables.

When I click in the model, a new table appears. The right opens up the properties with a default name (table14). I can change this and add the columns I need.

Once I’ve finished, I can add a relationship. There is an icon for this.

I’ll click this and then click and drag from Products to Discount. This gives me a new column in Discount by default, called Products_ProductID. Not a bad name, but in general I want a cleaner name. I’ll edit the relationship to use ProductID in both tables and delete the other column from the model.

Modeling with an image is a good way to start to visualize how things are setup and where you might be normalizing, or denormalizing data. I also want to know just how many things are in here and what is related to what.

Moving Forward

There are more things that can be done with tools like that to help ensure our databases are well designed and perform well. I’ve submitted feedback to the team and asked for some enhancements.

One of the things I might want to do from here is update my dev db from the model. I’ll show that in a future post.

For now, I like the idea of getting a model started from my SQL script, though clearly I need a clean script. I’ll do more testing with other scripts for both forward and reverse engineering.

Give Redgate Data Modeler a try and see if it helps you and your team get a handle on your database.

December 1, 2025
A Quick Look at Redgate Data Modeler

Redgate acquired a data modeling tool from Vertabelo recently and I wanted to explore how it works. This is a short look at this tool and how it might be useful in working with databases.

This is part of a series on Redgate Data Modeler.

A Simple Layout

The tool is a cloud tool, designed to work in a browser. This negates the need to install anything, but this also means you need to be connected to the Internet to use it. Once you get past the licensing (I won’t show this), you have a basic screen that looks like this:

There isn’t much to see and this doesn’t feel that intuitive to me, but that’s because I’m not familiar with it. Most tools have some sort of modeling surface to start, but here we have a list of models, of which I have none. That is because this is designed to be used by multiple people across multiple platforms with shared designs. Ideally that’s what many of us want, not a set of project files we have to share, version, copy, etc.

The icons at the top have two “new” ones at the left, some greyed out ones since I don’t have models, and then some layout ones on the right that control the left, top, and right panes/blades.

If I right click in the middle, I see two options, which correspond to the two icons on the left: new folder or new document.

A folder makes sense, as these are for organization. The documents make less sense, as I expected just a modeling diagram. Instead, if I pick this I get three choices: logical model, physical model, and sql script. I’ll choose logical model and go from there.

Logical Models

A logical database model is a kind of an outline of your entities and the domain of data you want to capture. When I click this button, I first get asked for a name, which makes sense.

Then I get a blank canvas that looks like the one below. I have my entities on the left, properties on the write and a canvas with some icons. There’s also a toolbar.

The icons above the canvas are where you can add entities. You can’t import anything here, which I don’t like, but that was never built. I get that most of us might go from Logical to Physical to SQL, but if I want to get a handle on existing databases, I have to add everything myself.

Let me start with a new entity. I’ll click this icon.

Once I do this, I get nothing. The icon is selected, and I need to click on the canvas, and I’ll see an entity. Note that the left shows this as an item with errors, which are reflected on the right in Entity Issues.

The error is I need an attribute. I can also see the name above on the right, where I can set the name, a comment, and add attributes. I’ll start with a few items that matter for SQL Server Central.

When I add a title, want to pick a type. In the attribute table, I can select a gear icon (cog). This is next to the datatype field.

This brings up a list of types I can choose. When I choose varchar, I get a box at the top for the length.

Once I have filled out what I need, I can see my canvas image is updated with the attributes. Notice that I’ve marked the three attritibutes as required (the M column) and the ArticleID as the PK (the PI column).

I’ll add a second entity, that I want to relate. Once I’ve added it, I see the icon at the top for a 1 to many relationship.

If I click this, I can then click on article and drag to ArticleSchedule. That gives me a visual linkage between the two items.

If I continue and add a few more entities, I can start to see a nice relationship for my model. I’ve added some many-many relationships, which you can see are different than the one-many.

Saving the Image

Once I want, I can save this as an image. There is also the option to share with others in my org, or export a PDF.

Once I click this, I choose the type and if I’m doing part of the model or the whole thing.

I click Generate and get a link to download my image.

When I download it and open it, I see this. An image of just my entities.

I can also generate documentation. When I click this icon, I get a choice of formats.

When I generate that, then I open it and see a document. It’s here if you want to look at it, but here’s an image of one page.

If I click on the Data Modeler icon in the upper left, I go back to the main screen with my model listed in the middle. I can see this is a logical model based on the icon.

Not a bad little tool to start modeling, though likely for most of the things I do, I’d live in a Physical model with the ability to import from a SQL Script. I’ll look at those features in another post, but this has shown you a quick look at getting started and creating a logical model.

Give Redgate Data Modeler a try and see if it helps you and your team get a handle on your database.

November 24, 2025
Monday Monitor Tips: ServiceNow Integration

Earlier this year I visited a customer that was using the Redgate Monitor webhook to integrate with ServiceNow. However, they were also trying to integrate in a richer way to create incidents and a richer experience.

We took that as a bit of feedback and recently released native ServiceNow integration to allow updates to incidents as status changes. Automatically.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

New Native Integration

Redgate Monitor originally only integrated natively with PagerDuty. Over time, we’ve add other ways to connect to other systems and send alerts or data to them. Slack and webhooks were available first , but recently we’ve changed.

If you click the gear icon in the upper right of Redgate Monitor, you’ll go to the configuration screen.

In here, look for the Notification settings. This likely as an “Improved” tag if you look at it in late 2025. Click this.

On the Notifications settings page, you see email settings at the top. Most customers configure this as email is still a great way to capture alerts and handle routing of info to a team.

If you scroll down then you see the other types of notifications. Slack has been there for some time, and if you click this, you see the details you can configure.

The new alert sinks are ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams. If I click the ServiceNow item, I see some details. I can enter my ServiceNow URL and the API key to connect. I can optionally also close an incident if the Alert ends. That’s always helpful.

Microsoft Teams is similar. Here I’m just sending messages, as I do in Slack. I can enter the URL, which would be for the location I want messages sent. I can optionally send a message when the Alert ends.

We still have the Webhook settings as well, so you can send to your orgs messaging system (Slack/Teams) and another location with a Webhook if you want. This might be useful for a different system or perhaps a dashboard where you are tracking information about databases.

Redgate Monitor has grown to add these new options to give you the flexibility you need to handle alerting staff about database issues.

Summary

Managing a large estate is hard, and it is incredibly helpful to have tools to organize, track, and share information. Redgate Monitor is a great platform for this, and with these new integrations, it can be used alongside existing tools to prevent you from missing any of those important alerts.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

November 10, 2025
The Book of Redgate: What Our Customers Say

This is from 2010, but I loved that people felt this way about Redgate Software. A lot of these words are things that we aim to express to each other and to customers.

Ingeniously Simple was a tagline that our founders aimed for with our first products. I still remember this and challenge developers to work towards this. However, I love these words being things that stand out: calm, dependable, Gold-Standard, Excellent, Trustworthy, even Love.

I have been proud to be a part of Redgate, and I want to ensure that customers not only get value from us for the money they spend, but that they want to, and like to, do business with us.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

November 7, 2025