Creating an ERD of an Existing Oracle Database With DB Designer 4

Today I was asked to prepare an ERD of an existing Oracle Database for a meeting. Forces DB Designer 4 was the tool of my choice. Although it’s written for MySQL (and there weren’t any bugfixes or releases since long time), some features work fine with Oracle too.
To get an ERD do the following.

“Reverse Engineering”
Open DB Designer 4, then open an empty canvas with “File -> New”. Choose the menu “Database -> Reverse Engineering”.

A DB Connection must be set up. Here it is wise to connect with the system user to avoid a bunch of error messages during the reverse engineering process.

Connect to the database. A new dialog opens. Here you can choose schema or tables which you want to include in the ERD. Everything other can be left to default values.

And here is the ERD

Saving the ERD as XML or PNG
This is not really possible with hundreds or even thousands of tables. Often DB Designer pops up a firework of error messages and crashes at the end.

Printing the ERD
Printing works fine, even with large ERDs. If you can print PDFs it is also an easy way to share ERDs with others. To Print out an ERD choose “File -> Page & Printer Setup”.

And at the end all those pages have to be glued together