The relationship graph
A relationship graph with hundreds of table occurrences isn't a map, it's a wall. FM Fathom takes a different sounding: start from the occurrence you care about, and explore outward from there.
How the view works
Open any table occurrence and its graph centers on it, marked with a FOCAL badge. Around it, FM Fathom lays out everything it connects to, and you choose how far out to look: 1, 2, or 3 hops from the toolbar.
Reading the view:
- Every occurrence card carries a colored bar keyed to its base table, so you can see at a glance which occurrences are the same underlying table wearing different names. In a solution with an anchor-buoy naming scheme, this makes the buoys obvious.
- Edges are the relationships. Hover or click one to see the match fields it's built on. Cartesian joins (the cross-product kind) are drawn dashed, so the unusual ones stand out.
- Pan, zoom, and the minimap work like you'd expect. Click any card to re-center the graph on it and keep exploring.
What it's for
- Untangling what an occurrence actually connects to before you touch it.
- Spotting which occurrences share a base table across contexts.
- Walking a chain: where does this portal's data actually come from, hop by hop?
The Full Graph
When you do want everything at once, Full Graph (under Table Occurrences in the sidebar) lays out the entire relationship graph on a clean grid with no overlapping nodes. Use find and filter to locate an occurrence in the crowd, and hide the noisy edge types (Cartesian joins, hub-and-spoke wiring) when they drown out the structure you're trying to see.
The two views split the work: Full Graph for the shape of the whole solution, the focal view for understanding one neighborhood properly before you change it.
Related
- Call chains: the same idea, for scripts
- Browsing the catalog