Drawing tools

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.

ArgoUML

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

ConceptDraw

Home: http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/cd5/main.php

OS: Mac and Windows

Languages: English, German, French, Spanish

Price: $299 (Academic pricing available)

Data Architect

Home: http://www.thekompany.com/home/

OS: Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X

Price: $59.95 USD

DBDesigner 4

Home: http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/

Comments: It works nicely but, doesn't work on MacOS X :( (Billy)

Licence: GPL

OS: Linux, Windows.

DB Designer Fork

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

DbSchema

Home: http://www.dbschema.com/

OS: Various.

Requires: Java Runtime Environment 1.4.

Price: $45.

DeZign for Databases

Home: http://www.datanamic.com/

Note: Supported databases - Many

OS: Windows

Price: Standard 195 euro/Professional 345 euro/Expert 595 euro

Dia

Home: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

Comments: Can be awkward to use

OS: Linux and MS Windows

Price: Free

Dico

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.

Druid

Home: http://druid.sourceforge.net/

Licence: GNU GPL

Requires: Java

Price: Free

ER Studio from Embarcadero Technologies

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)

ER/Win

Comment: Can do forward and reverse engineering

GraphViz (A Perl module)

Comment: This is the one to use.

Installation: http://savage.net.au/Ron/html/graphing-database-schema.html.

Price: Free

Meta Integration

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

ModelRight

Home: http://modelright.com/

OS: Windows

Price: $395 for Oracle, $195 for MySQL. Presumably US$

OmniGraffle

Comment: OmniGraffle is a fine piece of software (David Steinbrunner)

Home: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/

OS: Mac X (ie FreeBSD)

Poseidon for UML Community Edition

Home: http://www.gentleware.de/products/poseidonCE.php3

Comment: An extension of ArgoUML (above).

Price: Free

Rose

Comment: Can do forward and reverse engineering

Price: Heaps

Schemester

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/

SQLFairy aka SQL::Translator

Home: http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/

Comment: Manipulate structure data definitions (mostly database schemas) in interesting ways.

Licence: GNU General Public License.

Price: Free.

SQL Maestro

Home: http://www.sqlmaestro.com/

Comment: Administration and management tools for MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird and MaxDB.

Price: Per product.

TCM

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

TOAD Data Modeler

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.

Visio

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)

VisioModeler

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

Visual Thought

Home: http://www.bombshellstudios.com/samples/co/vt.html

Comment: Can be infuriating to use

OS: MS Windows

Price: Shareware

WWW SQL Designer

Home: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/

Comment: Requires PHP-enabled web server to install locally

Price: DonationWare

XCase

Home: http://www.xcase.com/

OS: Windows

Price: http://www.xcase.com/products.php?r=1024&t=products

XERD

Home: http://www.joshuahawcroft.com/products/xerd/

OS: MacOS X.

Price: $64.13 AUD (Australian Dollars).

http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0041

http://www.metaintegration.net/Products/MIMB/SupportedTools.html

Author

Ron Savage.

Home page: http://savage.net.au/index.html

This POD was converted to HTML by /Perl.html#fancy-pom2.pl

Version: 1.02 01-Jun-2006
This version disguises my email address.
Version: 1.01 28-Nov-2004
Version: 1.00 18-Feb-2002
Original version.

Licence

	All Programs of mine are 'OSI Certified Open Source Software';
	you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of
	The Artistic License, a copy of which is available at:
	http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

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