[CLUE-Tech] Database Design Tool for Linux?

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 20:23:19 -0700
Jeffery Cann <fabian at jefferycann.com> wrote:

> 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!

Ouch? Yeah, it is a little bit painful, I suppose. Some insightful person
observed, a while back, that yesterday's inventions become today's
luxuries, become tomorrow's necessities. I'm certain it wasn't Jello
Biafra, but that's the name stuck in my head.

> > 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.

Hmmm. Really. In my tinkering so far, I haven't uncovered what I consider
to be the incantation for such a result.

> 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.

Oh, Designer has it's drawbacks, but it wallops ErWin for producing clear
drawings. It's too bad it requires a repository in order to work, and it's
stuck with a bunch of uneeded bloat when all you want to do is
entity/physical modeling. But I digress.

> I have used Visio with much success.  No Linux version (now that it's
<snip>
> drawings it produces for CHEN ERDs look great.

I haven't used it for a while. Right now, I wish I had a copy. I don't
care about generating DDL, I just want a nice visualization tool for
working through the model.

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

Every once in a while, an ambitious thought such as that presents itself
to my brain. I believe Oracle already has a DTD for an XML description of
a schema. Hmmm, I wonder if there's a GTK interface for PL/SQL <G>.

-- 
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 undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
 - Thomas Paine