
8.1 Reverse Engineering to ORM
Ideally, you should always develop a database by forward engineering from ORM to a
logical model and then to a physical database schema. This is feasible if you are devel-
oping a new database from scratch. In practice, however, you might also need to mod-
ify existing databases that might not have been forward engineered from ORM. These
databases might also be populated with large volumes of data.
If the database was originally forward engineered from ORM, but changes were later
made directly to the physical database, you can reverse engineer those changes to the
logical model by refreshing it (see Chapter 16), and then ...