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Reverse Engineering SQL Server DBs with Visio Pro DBRE

The news is out: due to popular demand DBRE (Database Reverse Engineering) is [almost] back in Visio. It is currently out in preview, as announced in MS Power User , for Visio Pro for Office365 users at least. It is, however, only providing support for MS SQL Server and Oracle Server, although there is an ODBC Generic Driver too.
My test machine is a Surface Pro 1, which does not have SQL Server installed, so my instinct was to test DBRE with a SQL Azure database that I created for my eXplore Visio app  ( see Windows Store ).



Try as I might, I could not get the full database structure with the Microsoft SQL Server driver that I had installed by default. With a little help from Microsoft, I discovered that I needed to download the Microsoft ODBC Driver 13 for SQL Server from Microsoft ( see Download Driver). However, I still needed to set the default database for Visio to use as Microsoft SQL Server, not ODBC Generic Driver. In retrospect, it makes sense, but it did confuse me for a while.
Once I understood that, I was able to change my default database to the desired visioFeatures one, and to reverse engineer my SQL Azure database tables, views and stored procedures.

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My SQL and SharePoint Saturday additional content

I am presenting my view of using Visio to Visualize data with SQL Server and SharePoint today. The slideshow is available for viewing at https://doc.co/Q43c2m but, whilst I wait for my turn to talk, I have created a smart prism shape to demonstrate many of the smartness of shapes and the data linking features of Visio. The file can be downloaded from http://1drv.ms/1FDAZgI .

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Microsoft Visio 2013 Themes

Visio supports Microsoft Office themes with their variants, and I have been experimenting with their affect on data graphics, so I thought I would create a document with examples of each theme applied to some data graphics. I would hesitate before using some of these, but it is interesting to see the appearance of each.

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SQL Saturday Business Intelligence Special in Edinburgh

We had a fantastic weekend in Edinburgh where I presented Visio as a BI solution for SQL professionals at SQL Saturday. I volunteered because, quite frankly, I do not think that Microsoft promote Visio for BI enough, even though they have put in the BI domain for Microsoft partner competencies. This was a community event, so many thanks to all of the sponsors for enabling it, the many volunteers for running around, and especially to Jen Stirrup for organising it ( see http://jenstirrup.com/2015/06/15/jens-pass-diary-sqlsaturday-edinburgh-my-heartfelt-thanks-go-to/ ).

Adam Velo, a fellow MVP, took this photo of me, and he followed up with an excellent presentation about the psychology of data graphics (see http://blog.crmguru.co.uk/ ).

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Linking Data to Visio with SQL Server Stored Procedures

Visio Professional has the ability to link to various data sources, and one of the most popular is SQL Server. The DATA\Link Data to Shapes … function will present a UI to choose from a table or view, but does not provide any stored procedures. Therefore, this article present a VBA macro that demonstrates how a stored procedure can be added as a refreshable data recordset in Visio.

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