Re: tool for DB design

[William Bug <William.Bug@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nikolay,

Were you able to get any closer to your objective on this email thread?

I spent quite a bit of time researching the web on this question back in June - Is there an Open Source option for doing "round trip" data modeling for PostgreSQL?

As far as the E-R or UML diagramming, Dia and Umbrello are definitely the tools I liked the best, with ArgoUML coming in 3rd.  Dia is Gnome-based, Umbrello uses KDE and ArgoUML is Java Swing based.

Of these, only Dia appears to have "relatively" complete machinery for turning UML diagrams --> PostgreSQL DDL SQL and visa/versa.

The major options are listed here:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/links.html

Basically, these are a collection of scripts - PERL, PHP & Python, for turning the Dia UML objects (saved as XML in a Dia file) into DDL SQL.  The following tools were specifically capable of handling PostgreSQL's DDL SQL dialect:

Dia UML --> PostgreSQL DDL SQL

teDia2SQL

Dia2SQL

Dia2Postgres

(dia2PgSQL - this one I've lost and can't find it on the web anymore)

PostgreSQL DDL SQL --> Dia UM

PostgreSQL_AutoDoc

In the end, I chose teDia2SQL (http://tedia2sql.tigris.org/), though it doesn't do everything I needed, it seem to get me closest.

In the end, I started using ideas I got from reading the teDia2SQL code to write my own truly "round trip" scripts in Ruby to go back & forth easily between Dia & PostgreSQL DDL SQL.  Unfortunately, I had to move on to other tasks, before getting very far along on this, but I do hope to get back to it eventually.

I'm kinda hoping one of the Open Source UML tools - Umbrello, Neptune or ArgoUML/PoseidonUML will get to this task before I do.  If they added full "round trip" translation between their diagrams/models and PostgreSQL DDL SQL, and they all adopt the XMI file format, so that UML & E/R diagrams can be stored as SVG-like XML instances that any tool can open and edit, then we'll be set.

I expect we're still at least 1.5 - 2.0 years from there, yet.

Good luck.

Cheers,

Bill

On Nov 25, 2005, at 6:22 AM, Tino Wildenhain wrote:

Nikolay Samokhvalov schrieb:

dbvis isn't the thing what I need. Or I'm blind and cannot find where

I can draw ER/UML diagram then transform it to physical, then obtain

SQL code. Or, just physical->SQL. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, I mentioned DIA for this - reread my mail please ;)

I said DIA for ER -> SQL and dbvis for physical -> ER.

physical -> SQL is covered by pg_dump.

On 25/11/05, Tino Wildenhain <tino@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Freitag, den 25.11.2005, 02:25 +0300 schrieb Nikolay Samokhvalov:

Please, suggest any free/opensource tool for DB design under Linux. I

need following: ER (or UML)-diagram -> physical diagram -> SQL code (I

don't even dream about reverse transformation...) Quite good example

of such tool is Sybase PowerDesigner (which supports Postgres), but

AFAIK it runs only under win and costs $...

dia can do this and I guess a lot of other tools.

For the reverse check out db visualizer (dbvis)

http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/

Which has a very nice ER-view.

(With autorouting, which many tools, even the $$$-ones

miss)

++Tino

--

Best regards,

Nikolay

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Bill Bug

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