There appear to be some gaping holes between what SQL Server 2005 (and some other DBMSs for that matter) support and what you can model in Visio for Enterprise Architects.  Anyone else experience these problems and have a workaround? 

1.) How do you specify BIGINT data type for a field?  All of the Visio datatypes want to outout either int, tinyint, smallint or some numeric/decimal type.  I have created a user defined type my_bigint_type and used that in all my table definitions so it is a simple matter of editiing the DDL file output from the Generate tool, but this is not ideal as one needs to remember to do such manual edits everytime the file is regenerated.

2.) User defined types:  sp_addtype is used in the output DDL file for any User defined types I have created in Visio.  This effectively creates "aliases" for the system types on which the UDTs are bases, which is fine.  However, when attempting to create such a UDT based on nvarchar(max) SQL server gripes about it not being supported and to use CREATE TYPE instead of sp_addtype.  Again, a simple workaround is to then go and edit the DDL file, but it would be nice to not have to do this.

3.) How does one create a schema in Visio?  The namespace property in the table definition seems to be the most sensible place, but seems to be ignored, i.e. the DDL file sticks everything in the dbo schema.  I tried naming my tables schemaname.tablename but the schema still needs to be created beforehand and any alter table commands don't work as the reference the tablename in double quotes which seems to mess things up.

Am I asking too much from VEA and should I buy a "real" tool?

I'm moving this thread to the enterprise architect forum where someone should be able to better answer you questions.

~Ian

Hi Mick,

First of all apologies for the delayed response.

It is my understanding that this release of Visio doesn't support all the new features and changes made in SQL 2005.

However, the BIGINT datatype should be available from the type column drop down if you have SQL Server set as your default driver (from Database Options menu).

With regard to nvarchar(max) based user defined types and specifying schema - they are likely features not yet supported in VEA.

I recommend logging a bug through the MSDN Feedback center so that this can be tracked by the product team for next release.

Regards,

Ramesh Rajagopal.