.This is a simple collection of notes about software drawing tools.
Some of these tools are specifically for database schemas, and some for modelling in general.
Contributions started via the Perl DBI users mailing list (dbi-users-subscribe@perl.org), but anyone can email me re additions and corrections.
I have extracted bits and pieces from peoples' emails, and coincidentally from some of my students, who are using various of the packages this very week. So, the 'Comments' section should be regarded as personal, but very rarely from me.
Many thanks to all those who replied to my posting (May, 2003) on the list.
Tools are listed in alphabetical order.
Home: http://www.da-soft.com/anydac/
Comment: A Delphi, C++Builder and FreePascal interface to various database servers.
Price: $399 (single user); $1795 (site).
Home: http://argouml.tigris.org/
Comment: A UML design tool with cognitive support (Their home page)
Comment: Poseidon for UML (below) is an extension of ArgoUML.
Price: Free
Home: http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/cd5/main.php
OS: Mac and Windows
Languages: English, German, French, Spanish
Price: $299 (Academic pricing available)
Home: http://www.thekompany.com/home/
OS: Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X
Price: $59.95 USD
Home: http://microolap.com/products/database/postgresql-designer
OS: Windows 2000, XP, 2003
Price: Personal/Business/Commercial/Educational
Home: http://www.nucleonsoftware.com/DatabaseMaster.aspx
OS: Windows (presumably)
Price: Single $39/Site $390
Home: http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
Comments: It works nicely but, doesn't work on MacOS X :( says Billy
Licence: GPL
OS: Linux, Windows.
Home: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/
Comments: DB Designer Fork is a fork of fabFORCE's DBDesigner 4
Licence: GPL
OS: Linux, Windows
Supports: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and FireBird, and - reportedly - Postgres via ODBC
Home: http://www.dbschema.com/
OS: Various.
Requires: Java Runtime Environment 1.4.
Price: $45.
Comment: Cross-platform database development and management tool.
Home: http://www.dbsolo.com/
OS: Various.
Price: 1 .. 5 users: $129 USD.
Home: http://www.datanamic.com/
Note: Supported databases - Many
OS: Windows
Price: Standard 195 euro/Professional 345 euro/Expert 595 euro
Home: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
Comments: Can be awkward to use
OS: Linux and MS Windows
Price: Free
Home: http://www.guh-software.de/dico_en.html
Comments: Dico is a Java application to display database-schema.
OS: Windows, Linux, and perhaps Mac OS X and Solaris
Requires: Java
Price: 39 euros for a single user. See web site for details.
Home: http://druid.sourceforge.net/
Licence: GNU GPL
Requires: Java
Price: Free
Comment: Can do forward and reverse engineering
Comment: ER Studio is a fine product, but Visio has my interest because of the power of the drawing component. Since they added on database connectivity it could give these others a run for their money (Tim Harsch)
Comment: I've used ER Studio for several years now and it really is a useful tool (if you've got a few grand lying around) (Tim Harsch)
Comment: Can do forward and reverse engineering
Comment: This is the one to use. It is a complete re-write of the original GraphViz
Source: See CPAN or https://savage.net.au/Perl-modules.html
Price: Free
Home: http://htsql.org/
Comment: A URI-based high-level query language
Price: Use of HTSQL with open source databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite) is royalty free under BSD-style conditions. Usage of HTSQL with proprietary database systems (Oracle, Microsoft SQL) requires a commercial license.
Home: http://www.devart.com/linqconnect/
Comment: Offers .NET connectivity to SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and SQLite.
OS: Windows
Price: $149 .. $1499
Home: http://www.metaintegration.net/
Comment: A suite of packages
Comment: See http://www.metaintegration.net/Products/MIMB/SupportedTools.html
Price: http://www.metaintegration.net/Products/Pricing.html
Home: http://modelright.com/
OS: Windows
Price: $395 for Oracle, $195 for MySQL. Presumably US$
Comment: OmniGraffle is a fine piece of software (David Steinbrunner)
Home: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/
OS: Mac X (ie FreeBSD)
Home: http://plantuml.com/
Price: Free.
Home: http://www.gentleware.de/products/poseidonCE.php3
Comment: An extension of ArgoUML (above).
Price: Free
Home: https://www.quickdatabasediagrams.com/
Comment: Web-based, so (currently) your diagrams are public.
Price: Free.
Comment: Can do forward and reverse engineering
Price: Heaps
Home: http://www.schemester.co.uk/
Cost: Free
Database: Oracle
References to: PL/SQL Developer (for a pl/sql IDE): http://www.allroundautomations.com/
References to: ClearSQL (for pl/sql code review): http://www.clearsql.com/
Home: http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/
Comment: Manipulate structure data definitions (mostly database schemas) in interesting ways.
Licence: GNU General Public License.
Price: Free.
Home: http://www.sqlmaestro.com/
Comment: Administration and management tools for MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird and MaxDB.
Price: Per product.
Home: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm/
Comment: There's TCM, which has editors for a bunch of UML and UML-like diagrams (including ERDs, which schema diagrams generally are). It's pretty old-school, but i find it useful. It's especially nice because they include the description of their file format with the documentation, and it's all text, so it's fairly easy to write a perl script to automatically create a schema diagram for you (johnnnnnn)
Comments: Schema is stored in a text file. Perl module crying out to be written
Previous name: Case Studio 2
Home: http://www.casestudio.com/enu/default.aspx
OS: Windows.
Databases: 40+.
Comment: Integrates with TOAD, an admin tool for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and MySQL.
Price: Expensive.
Comment: Probably part of Visio Studio Enterprise. Can do forward and reverse engineering
Comment: The Visio product that I suspect may be superior to ER, having seen an impressive demo, is nice because it comes with all the other stuff (VC++, VB, VJ++, Foxpro(?), etc.) for about the same price as ER (Tim Harsch)
OS: MS Windows
Price: $500 USD (approx)
Home: http://www.orm.net/resources.html
Comment: Abandoned by MS
Comment: I'm not certain but I think this is the Visio component of Visual Studio Enterprise. I once saw a demo of this and it looks very nice: because Visio is the drawing/graphical component and it is backed by forward/reverse engineering components that can be used for several of the major RDBMS' (Tim Harsch)
OS: MS Windows
Price: Free
Home: http://www.bombshellstudios.com/samples/co/vt.html
Comment: Can be infuriating to use
OS: MS Windows
Price: Shareware
Home: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/
Comment: Requires PHP-enabled web server to install locally
Price: DonationWare
Home: http://www.xcase.com/
OS: Windows
Price: http://www.xcase.com/products.php?r=1024&t=products
Home: http://www.joshuahawcroft.com/products/xerd/
OS: MacOS X.
Price: $64.13 AUD (Australian Dollars).
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/06/018207
http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0041
http://www.metaintegration.net/Products/MIMB/SupportedTools.html
Ron Savage .
Home: https://savage.net.au/index.html
This version disguises my email address.
Original version.
Australian Copyright © 2002 Ron Savage. All rights reserved.
All Programs of mine are 'OSI Certified Open Source Software';
you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of
The Perl License, a copy of which is available at:
L<http://dev.perl.org/licenses/>