Entity Relationship Modeling Tools for Mac OS X
January 23rd, 2007 | by Joe |In my Database class this evening we were watching the instructor do some database modeling using Visio. I was playing along using Omnigraffle, but after a while it didn’t go as far as Visio did in terms of automatically creating relationships, foreign keys, and that sort of thing. I wanted something more developer oriented. So I did some quick research on what is available:
MySQL Workbench
Supports MySQL, obviously. I might wind up using this just because I almost entirely deal with MySQL. The only variable in that is my forays into Oracle lately.
http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/workbench/
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Workbench
Aquafold Data Studio
Supports Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, MySQL - code generation looks powerful.
Free version 4.7, 6.0 costs $399. 4.7 looks dated compared to the 6.0 version, but man the price jump!
http://www.aquafold.com/
Visual Paradigm
Many interesting and compelling variations. Community Edition is free. This one looks pretty nice to me - my cup of tea. Lots of related products and editions, so there are options for most modeling needs, budgets, and scopes.
http://www.visual-paradigm.com/product/vpuml/communityedition.jsp
http://www.visual-paradigm.com/
ConceptDraw VI Pro
Standard $149, Pro $299
http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/cd5/applications_uml.php
So far I’ve cracked open MySQL Workbench and Visual Paradigm for UML Community Edition. I am only at the beginning of exploring these tools, so I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Tags: Mac OS X
One Response to “Entity Relationship Modeling Tools for Mac OS X”
By Alderete on Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
In the past I’ve used a tool called XERD. It’s pretty basic, but that’s all I really want. But it’s been a long time since it was updated, so I’ve switched over to using OmniGraffle, and creating the tables by hand, using CocoaMySQL, or Migrations in Rails.