Mark Lewis wrote:
An ER diagram is the traditional formal way to document a database
schema. There are a bunch of (expensive) commercial tools that will
reverse-engineer your schema to an ER diagram, then allow you to modify
the diagram, print pretty pictures and spit out DDL to create the schema
for the database of your choice, which is a convenient way to support
multiple target databases, by the way.
The best free tool I've run into for this task was Druid
(druid.sourceforge.net). The GUI takes some getting used to, but it's
pretty slick. Or at least it was 4 years ago, which is the last time I
used it.
Dia also has an ER diagram palette.
I've got Dia installed so I'll take a look at that. Druid looks good and
is still an active project. I'll have to install the JDBC drivers for my
database.
For Lan and others, the database is going to be Firebird
<http://www.firebirdsql.org> <http://www.ibphoenix.com>. I chose this
because of compatibility with my programming tools, familiarity, small
footprint, fully cross-platform and no need of a DBA or tuning. Plus I
can do things like replication (to different server), backup while in
use, and mirroring (duplicate database file onto different disk).
The Firebird database is the open source version of Borland Interbase,
which forked at version 6.0 of Interbase. The guy who invented Interbase
was Jim Starkey who went on to do Firebird. He has now been hired by
MySQL AB to write the transactional engine for MySQL to make it fully
ACID compliant, probably because Oracle bought InnoDB and MySQL AB
doesn't trust them to continue supporting it.
The current database is in Borland Paradox which is being scaled up to
be multi-user with full transactional support with both dedicated
data-entry apps and report generators plus a web interface for data
viewing. The goal is to remove the Borland Database Engine (BDE) and
replace it with Firebird. Since I already have a lot of code, I'm not
interested in rewriting the apps except for the DB access. That would be
a year long project.
Gus
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