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Are VIEWS (CREATE VIEW) represented in an ERD? If so, how do you represent them and specify what tables they came from?

leeand00
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    Not sure if this'll help you or not, but here's a post highlighting a Toad feature that does this with some screenshots. Maybe it will at least give you some leads. http://www.toadworld.com/Blogs/tabid/67/EntryId/573/Reverse-Engineer-Views-into-an-ERD.aspx – squillman Jul 17 '12 at 14:31
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    As far as I can remember, PowerDesigner allows you to represent a view using a notation similar to that of a table but with a special icon near the table name. If your tool does not provide for this use a naming standard to distinguish views from table and or/color. – NoChance Jul 17 '12 at 20:33

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There is a view object available in several ERD tools that I've seen (TOAD, Agilian, Visio). I'm not entirely sure that it is formally a part of any notation, but could be construed as a stereotype, as it is effectively just another entity.

Demonstrating the relationship to the source tables is a bit more difficult, IMO. I would just use a generic connector, especially as the relationship is likely much more complex than can be described visually (I just created a view that is populated in part by functions that run complex queries on multiple tables). I would absolutely not use the relationship connectors.

Jeffrey Alan Lee
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