Database Documentation / Design Illustration Tool

Cork Skate

Folks,

Just want to ask if there is any good tool/application out there to manage database tables and all of their attributes. Not building them, just to display whats what in a graphical form, similar to Visio -> 'Database Model Diagram' but with a bit more to it, i just want to put in more detail.

Any ideas?

Tom Dunne

I'm not aware of any that do it in graphical form (but that's not to say none exist), but some management tools will generate a diagram from a schema.

What DBMS?

croo

It's been a while since I looked but last time I did I found
http://www.aquafold.com/aquadatastudio.html
Will do what you asked. I believe if you work on an open source project you can get free license keys... at least we did on the Adempiere ERP project.
There might be a limited/trial version to download if your needs are short term.

If you only wanted to create a ERD image then I believe SchemaSpy (available on Sourceforge) can read most database schema to create the model.
http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/sample/relationships.html

I've not looked recently but I'd be amazed if there is not some plugin (or combination of plugins) for the eclipse IDE that would also provide such functonality.

As Tom asked - which DB might have a big bearing on the options

DublinWriter

Both Sybase PowerDesigner and IBM Rational Rose are pretty good.