Reverse Engineering Database to ER Model

Entity-Relationship (ER) model is a high level conceptual data model and has become universally popular as their representations are very close to the way the end-users perceive data in a database. A good ER model plays a vital role not only in initial development and launching of the database application, but also in the phase of maintenance. Database Reverse Engineering (DBRE) is the process of extracting high-level conceptual structure (ER Model) of the relational database. This is more essential for databases which have no or very poor conceptual descriptions in place. All the existing approaches for reverse engineering have tried to extract the conceptual information by analysing the table structures manually. This paper proposes a significantly automated approach, for extracting important elements of an ER model from the relational database metadata. This would help organizations to perform reverse engineering of the relational databases in an effective and scalable way.