Recommended Data Modeling Tools?

dnxthx asks: "After performing a fairly comprehensive web search (including Slashdot) I came to the (possibly incorrect) conclusion that there were no high-visibility sites that comprehensively reviewed and compared data modeling tools such as ER/Studio, ERWin, DeZign for Databases, System Architect, or Visio for Enterprise Architects. Since some of these tools can be quite expensive (ERWin is about $4K US it seems), I was wondering what the Slashdot community's experiences were with data modeling tools such as these, or some that our group has overlooked."

Comments

dia & tedia2sql

[szap]

We have been using dia and tedia2sql for many of our projects. This includes a project involving about a hundred tables, with foriegn keys all over, and a number of user defined functions (aka Stored Procedures) and aggregate functions.

How it's done is, roughly, for a few related tables:

1. Create tables using dia's UML's classes.
2. Join the tables using UML Association to establish foreign keys.
3. Set dia to autofit diagram into a number of pages.
4. Add comments, draw pictures, whatever dia can draw.
5. Save as an uncompressed XML file, chuck it into CVS. CVS likes text, so don't compress it.
6. Optional: Print out pretty diagrams to printer. Dia's autofit is nice.

Repeat above if you can't fit your tables into a set of nice looking pages.

1. Create a Makefile to convert .dia to .sql using tedia2sql, and .dia to .eps using dia. (Left as an excerise to the reader). Bonus: autogen .eps to .pdf.
2. Set up tedia2sql config to generate to your favourite rdbms. Or change Makefile to generate SQLs for each of Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL.
3. Type 'make'.

1. 5. Profit!

Congrats! You have have fully printable, documentated, usable SQLs, and have version control on the schemas too. (Missing step is "4. Debug")

P.S. tedia2sql is written in easily hackable perl.