Curt Sampson wrote:
>
>>>From: Jean-Christian Imbeault <jc@mega-bucks.co.jp>
>>>
>>>Can anyone recommend a free GUI DB design tool for Windows I could use
>>>to model my database design? (something similar to the design tool in MS
>>>access).
>>>
>
...
> So after about half an hour of playing, I abandoned it. Unfortunately,
> I still have a need for some sort of graphical tool so I can make
> pretty pictures for clients, but I've got a good budget for it, so I'd
> be interested in any other recommendations. But I found this one hard
> enough to use that in the end my "tool" may be paying a drone to keep a
> Visio diagram up-to-date based on changes to my text files.
If you have the budget, I've found PowerDesigner from Sybase to be very
nice. It's something like $995 for the "Physical Designer" product, but
a company can afford that. It understands every major DB that I've ever
heard of, plus multiple versions of most of them (yes, it has an entry
for Postgresql 7.x). You can create a schema from scratch, or it will
reverse engineer a schema to the graphic too, though you will have to
manually arrange the tables and reference lines to make it look nice.
The drawing tool is top-notch and will do probably everything you want
it to. Then after you change the schema to what you want, it can create
the schema file to be used in psql to create the DB. It also has report
generation capability (HTML & RTF output), as well as a
consistency/error checker.
If you have a big enough budget, they also have ERD and other tools in
the product family, but I've never used any of them. I find the
Physical Designer to be more than adequate for my work. The only real
drawback is that it only runs on an Win32 platform; but then VMWare
solves that problem by letting me run ms-win2k under Linux. :-)
HTH,
Kevin