Data Modeling Editor with Support for Reverse Data Engineering

The thesis builds on author's bachelor thesis called An editor of ER diagrams supporting conversions to relational model and application ERtoS, which was created as a part of it. The original program supports drawing ER diagrams using the classical notation, also ISA hierarchies, n-ary relationships, relationships with attributes and multivalued attributes are supported. The main goal of this thesis is to implement reverse engineering into the ERtoS editor that would enable creating ER diagrams from existing databases. The resulting editor supports both conceptual and logical models and their two-way conversion. The logical model can be exported as an SQL script. The program uses direct database connection to perform the data reverse engineering (DRE). The set of supported databases can be extended using plugins. The thesis contains the theoretical introduction to ER modeling and DRE. A few existing DRE algorithms are compared, the selected algorithm is described in detail including suggested improvements and implementation. Finally the thesis concludes with a comparison of similar programs from both commercial and academic domain