[CLUE-Tech] Database Design Tool for Linux?

[Jeffery Cann]

On Thursday 17 January 2002 04:55 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> As I begin to cogitate upon a little educational exercise here at home, a
> PHP/PostgreSQL sandbox, I'm discovering that I feel almost stuck without a
> graphical database design tool. 

Ouch!

> Granted, I can whip out a pencil and a
> flowcharting template (yes, I own a couple of those, and I used to use
> them), or snag a cheap white board. But, I'm struck with the lack of such
> a tool for linux. Yes, there's GNU/Dia, but it isn't really up to the
> task. It seems pretty clunky to me, and its entity shapeset is severly
> limited. 

I have used Dia successfully for database (entity) design.  It will not work 
if you are looking for a CASE tool.

> So have I missed something?

I haven't seen anything as mature as Windoze counterparts.  On the other 
hand, the CASE tools I have used on Windoze pretty much sucked until about 
two years ago.  Some (like Oracle's) _still_ suck.

I have used Visio with much success.  No Linux version (now that it's owned 
by Microsloth, there never will be -- which is too bad).  I like it because 
it will reverse engineer (and then diagram) existing schema.  If you have the 
'enterprise' edition, it will build SQL DDL statements for the schema that 
you have drawn -- i.e., it is a CASE tool.  I like it because, frankly, the 
drawings it produces for CHEN ERDs look great.

Unlike traditional CASE tools, I don't think there is versioning support.  
But, you could obviously store DDL files in CVS.

Maybe as an educational exercise you can roll your own CASE tool on Linux?

:^p

Later,
Jeff