[NBLUG/talk] Database design tools

[Eric Eisenhart]

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.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Director-At-Large
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244