Thread: Looking for a good ERD Tool

Looking for a good ERD Tool

From
Rob Brenart
Date:
I'm looking for a good ERD tool that's designed to work with
PostgreSQL... currently I use the one found here
http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/index.php for MySQL, and I just
create the actual tables and such by hand... kinda of a kludge, and I
lose all the reverse engineering benefits... but cest'le'vie.

Anyway, would like to find a similar tool specifically designed for
PostgreSQL... does one exist or is it a futile search?

Re: Looking for a good ERD Tool

From
"Relyea, Mike"
Date:
I don't know what OS you're using, but I recently went through the same
search on a very tight budget (free).  I ended up using Visio because I
already had it.  I have Visio 2002 but found out that the standard
version that I have won't connect to an ODBC DB and generate an ERD.
However, the Pro version will.  In my case, I ended up biting the bullet
and creating everything by hand.  My DB only has 41 tables, so it wasn't
as bad as I was afraid it would be.

I also used the trial version of EMS PostgreSQL Manager.  It was OK.  I
really only used it to create a diagram.  It did create the diagram.
But by the time I rearranged all of the tables so that the lines
representing my FK's weren't crossing and the whole diagram fit on an
11x17 sheet of paper and was still big enough to be legible - it ended
up taking about the same amount of time as it took me in Visio to create
the whole thing myself.

Re: Looking for a good ERD Tool

From
Jamie Deppeler
Date:
There are probability* *a few around, but i think most people just use a
flowcharting software to created designs. I know for the work that i do
with postgresql i use smartdraw as it can do anything i want then i
apply these designs to postgresql using EMS Manager.


Rob Brenart wrote:

> I'm looking for a good ERD tool that's designed to work with
> PostgreSQL... currently I use the one found here
> http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/index.php for MySQL, and I just
> create the actual tables and such by hand... kinda of a kludge, and I
> lose all the reverse engineering benefits... but cest'le'vie.
>
> Anyway, would like to find a similar tool specifically designed for
> PostgreSQL... does one exist or is it a futile search?
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
>
>
>


Re: Looking for a good ERD Tool

From
Rob Brenart
Date:
>> I was afraid of that, it's such a useless duplication of effort, but
>> what can you do... what's EMS Manager though, I'm just using phpPgAdmin
>>
>>
> EMS is a more polished version phpPgAdmin has a lot more features

I dunno if I'd define the same way you have, one of the great things
about phpPgAdmin is that it's installed completely server side, so you
can access it from any computer with a browser... and more importantly,
you can do so without opening up any ports and making your postgresql
database accessible remotely.

Regardless, I'm enjoying it so far, phpPgAdmin is just missing too
much.... and I see that the professional ($500) version has the ERD
tools I was talking about, does anyone have experience with these, or
are there better pay to play tools for these?

Re: Looking for a good ERD Tool

From
Hannes Dorbath
Date:
On 07.07.2005 06:23, Rob Brenart wrote:

> Anyway, would like to find a similar tool specifically designed for
> PostgreSQL... does one exist or is it a futile search?

I tested almost anything that is out there over the years..

http://www.casestudio.com

Works perfect with PG8, fully script- and extendable, great support and
almost bugfree, but it's Win32 only.