Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler offers you a way to make sure your design is of good quality. Making sure of the quality can be done very easily: it is all based on Design Rules.

 

The rules are defined per category: General, Logical, Relational, Process Model and Physical. And under each category per element type of that category. For example for Logical: Entity, Attribute, Key and View. They are also defined as errors or warnings depending how serious they are.

There are pre-defined Design Rules that can be found from Tools|Design Rules and Transformations|Design Rules and by selecting Tools|Design Rules and Transformations|  Custom Rules you can define your own rules:

What does a Design Rule do? It checks that the rule defined has been obeyed. In pre-defined rules you will find rules like

• Identify entities without attributes
• Check for entity maximum name length
• Identify attributes without datatype
• etc

To check the Design Rules you can either go to Tools|Design Rules and Transformations| Design Rules or press the Design Rules button that can be seen in several places in Data Modeler while designing the database, then select Apply All. For example when generating the DDLs you can find the button on the lower left corner:

Let’s select Design Rules and Apply All:

Now you can see all the errors (red) and warnings (blue) that exists in your design compared to the Design Rules:

Double-click on one of the result rows and it will take you directly to the place the problem exists and you can fix it.

If you do not want to execute all the rules at a time you can define Rule Sets. Select the Rule Sets tab and press the green plus to add a new Rule Set. Define the name for it and press Save.

Then press the Properties icon (XYZ and a pen).Select the Design Rules wanted from the list and press the arrow pointing to right.

Press OK.

Now if you Press Apply Selected instead of Apply All and then select the Rule Set you want, only those Rules are checked.