Problem getting started using Visio 2003 to reverse engineer my DB

[Ted]

I have the professional edition of MS Visual Studio 2005, the
developer's edition of MS SQL Server 2005, and the professional edition
of MS Visual Studio 2003 (installed in that order), running on Windows
XP. All service packs or updates have been installed. With each
installation, I selected to install everything.

I found, searching in the Visio 2003 help, the following:

On the File menu, point to New, point to Database, and then click
Database Model Diagram.
On the Database menu, click Reverse Engineer.


However, when attempting to follow this, I found that there is no
"Reverse Engineer" item on the "Database" submenu. Nor have I found
anything in customize or options that would allow me to add it, just in
case for some reason it is not enabled by default. All I find on this
submenu are six options, US units and metric versions of "Database
Model", "Express-G" and "ORM Diagram".

Why is the documentation for Visio 2003 inconsistent with my
installation of it? Is there a way to fix this?

I did find a database wizard, but it doesn't let me create diagram
items from the suite of tables in my SQL Server database. While
workingthrough it, I did find a dialog to open files, but it contained
a host of meaningless names of Visio files with no information about
what they contain.

I am trying to follow what the provided documentation says, but it says
nothing about what to do if I don't see what it says I should see.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Ted

 

[Ted]

I found the source of the problem. What the instructions didn't say
was that one should select the database diagram first, and then a
"Database" item would appear on the main menu, and the reverse engineer
item is available there.

However, I have no joy. When I try to select my SQL server database as
the item to be reverse engineered, it fails with an error complaining
that the SQL Server driver is not compatible with my database. As I
created the database, I KNOW it is an SQL Server database, so it must
be that either Visio or its driver for connecting to SQL Server
databases is seriously broken.

Another irritant is that even though I installed SQL Server to use both
Windows authentication and SQL Server authentication, the reverse
engineering "wizard" insists on using SQL Server authentication.

The whole reason I bought Visio was to use it's reverse engineering
capability to produce entity relationship diagrams for my databases. I
will not be a happy use if the damned thing is too broken to use for
this purpose. Most of the databases in question have many dozens to
hundreds of tables, so producing these diagrams manually is tedious at
best!

Ted

 

[Michel LAPLANE]

You must get the Visio for enterprise architect version that come's with
"VS2005 Studio Team system for software architect"