SQL2XMI: Reverse Engineering of UML-ER Diagrams from Relational Database Schemas

Data modeling is an essential part of the software development process, and together with application modeling forms the core of the model-driven approach to software engineering. While UML is considered the standard for application modeling, there is really no corresponding open standard for data modeling. In this paper, we propose an approach and a tool to help bridge the gap between application and data modeling based on source transformation technology. The tool, called SQL2XMI, automatically transforms an SQL schema into a UML-ER model expressed in XML meta interchange (XMI) 2.1. By bringing the data model to the UML world, both data and application models can be manipulated using the same UML-based tools.