[NBLUG/talk] Database design tools

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Mon Nov 29 12:33:24 PST 2004


On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 10:35:09PM -0800, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 04:37:18PM -0800, Troy Arnold wrote:
> > I can make a decent visual representation with Dia, but Dezign is faster
> > and will also export SQL to generate the tables for me.
> > 
> > So I'm wondering if there is something that will run natively under
> > Linux that is more appropriate for what I want to do then Dia is.
> 
> Well, if you draw things "right" (UML-style class diagrams, typically) in
> Dia, there's some tools out there for converting a dia drawing into SQL. 
> "dia2sql" will help you find some.  I've played around with one of them
> before.
> 
> ArgoUML's another tool for diagraming things like this that I've played
> around with a bit; it tries a lot more to help you through things than Dia
> does and only does UML.  After a few minutes with google I figured out that
> ArgoUML stores things in an XML-type format known as "XMI" that other UML
> tools, such as "UML2SQL" and Rational Rose can also handle.
> 
> Neither dia2sql or UML2SQL would be quite as easy to use, but saving a file
> then running another tool doesn't seem too bad to me.

Thanks, Eric.  I had no clue about UML --> SQL tools.  I did some
querying on freshmeat and found this GPL'ed tool:
<http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/>

It has a few UI quirks and some font issues, but seems to do exactly
what I need, and lets me do it quickly.  Given some of the oddities of
the UI, I expected it to crash from time to time, but it hasn't done so
yet.  The exported SQL and .png images look good too, but I haven't
pushed it.  Also, it's about $229 cheaper than the $229 asking price of
Dezign. ;-)

-troy








More information about the talk mailing list