Creating Models from Databases with Billions of Tables

By now you know I’m prone to exaggeration so that “billions” thing is a stretch, but you get the point hopefully.

Lots of legacy databases have hundreds or even more tables in them.

People building Entity Data Models by reverse engineering a database often bring every table and view from the database into a single model.

Here’s an untouched model built from all of the tables and view of the AdventureWorks database – totalling about 95 entities.

awmodelbig

This is already unmanageable and causes design time performance issues, and it’s not even 100 entities.

I get questions all of the time from developers asking what to do  with large models.

Here is a recent question I got via email":

“I have a database with 150+ tables. Would you break the model up into multiple edmx files?”

My response (with some enhancements for the sake of this blog post):

Yes I would. I have lots of clients working with multiple models. One approach is to think of a model per transaction. E.g., if you have a data entry screen that only needs 6 entities, build a model for that. (That may be exaggerated).

Take a look at:

http://www.ideablade.com/WardsCorner/WardsCorner_home.aspx  scroll down to his large model discussion & demo. Ward and I have come up with the same conclusion. Ward has written something like a dissertation as he goes through the pros & cons of various approaches to the problem.

Also, another approach to consider (with or without breaking up the model) is a different designer that doesn’t try to visualize all of the entities (which makes things so cumbersome with the EDMX designer). LLBLGen Pro is already a great ORM in its own right. But they’ve taken their knowledge and built a deisgner specifically for EF4 with the goal of dealing with larger models.

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2010/04/28/llblgen-pro-v3-0-with-entity-framework-v4-0-12m-video.aspx

Finally, just as an FYI, I’m guest editing an upcoming issue of DevPro Connections magazine and specifically asked Patrik Lowendahl to write an article on this very topic.

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2 thoughts on “Creating Models from Databases with Billions of Tables

  1. Interesting point. Out of interest, do you have any feel for the extent to which you would/should use multiple models if you’re doing code-first with lots of types?

  2. If you are using code first then I expect it should be easy to envision your domain boundaries. You’d define which classes belong in a domain by whatever you expose through the context. Does that makes sense? I don’t hnk you need to think about "multiple models", just focus on a context class and what entities it exposes.

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