What was that again? This field should be 50 characters long according to the data model. But I already get an error when I try to write 42 characters into it! Has anyone forgotten to update the data model again?

Does that sound familiar?

There can be many reasons why the planned and actual status of productive databases sometimes do not match. It maybe that

• Documentation on databases are not available at all or are only partially available
• Employees with the appropriate know-how have left the company in the meantime
• The DBMS can not represent a format intended during the creation, therefore uses an alternative format but does not report an error
• As described above, the data model has not been updated (if the database is maintained manually)
• If several employees are working on maintenance, the overview will eventually be lost, especially with larger data models

If there is no reliable reverse engineering tool available in such cases, the determination of the effective structure of a database can cost a lot of effort and even then be accompanied by residual uncertainties.
We have developed the analysis tool dbExame for such cases.

If an ODBC driver is available for your database, the problem is generally solved!

dbExame scans the database of the specified user and lists the tables contained in it.
For each individual table, all contained fields, their data types as well as their indexes and constraints are determined at the push of a button.

In this way, you get the exact structure of the database from its current state and not from more or less up-to-date documentation!

dbExame also scans large databases with many tables or tables with a lot of fields.