A user recently asked:
What kind of approaches and techniques can you employ to become familiar with an existing database if you are tasked with supporting and/or modifying it? How can you easily and effectively ramp up your knowledge of a database you have never seen before?
Here was my reply:
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The first thing I do is create an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD). Sometimes you can simply describe the metadata with command-line tools but to save time there are some tools that can generate a diagram automatically.
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Second, examine each table and column make sure I learn the meaning of what it stores.
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Third, examine each relationship and make sure I understand how the tables relate to one another.
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Fourth, read any views or triggers to understand custom data integrity enforcement or cascading operations.
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Fifth, read any stored procedures. Also read SQL access privileges if there are such.
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Sixth, read through parts of the application code that use the database. That’s where some additional business rules and data integrity rules are enforced.
I’m posting to my blog the questions I’ve answered on StackOverflow, which earned the “Good Answer” badge. This was my answer to “What are the Best Ways to Understand an Unfamiliar Database?“
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