SQL Developer Data Modeler Quick Tip: Use SubViews

Modeling is cute when you’re in a class and the sample application is for a rotisserie league for fantasy football, or you need a shopping cart ordering system for online retail. You spend a few hours and might come up with several dozen tables. But what about in the real world when you are trying to wrap your head around

Modeling is cute when you’re in a class and the sample application is for a rotisserie league for fantasy football, or you need a shopping cart ordering system for online retail. You spend a few hours and might come up with several dozen tables.

But what about in the real world when you are trying to wrap your head around something with several thousand (or more!) objects?

Enter the SubView

SubViews allow the user to take a group of entities or objects from the main model area and place them in a separate space. It’s always easier to break down really big problems into smaller, easier to digest pieces. So instead of having the ENTIRE list of VIEWS from SYS in 11gR2, I might only be looking at the views that the SCHEDULER depends on. There’s only 30 or so of those objects.

There are 2 ways to add an object to a SubView

  • Drag the object from the tree into an existing SubView diagram space
  • Multi-select the objects from the model space, and choose ‘Create SubView from selected

To get an idea of why this might be necessary, check out how far out I need to zoom to just see all the objects in my model.

Create the SubView

Since my objects are all over the model, I need to drag them from the tree to an existing SubView. So I need to create the SubView first. Easiest way to do that is mouse-right-click on the ‘SubView’ tree parent node and choose ‘New SubView.’ Once it’s created, you’ll see a new model space on the right. If you don’t see it, simply select the new SubView in the tree and mouse-right-click and choose ‘Show Diagram’.

You can find out how to add the objects to the new SubView by reading the the full article at That Jeff Smith.com.