Luke wrote: >so it's like Microsoft Access? I don't get it...
No, Microsoft Access is a development environment sitting on top of a simplistic database (JET). Access gives you a nice GUI to help you interactively build up your database, and it makes a great prototyping tool and data massage tool, but it isn't very good for data modelling. I'm talking about proper data modelling tools, where you design the conceptual and physical databases, then generate scripts to build them (e.g. in Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, etc.) and generate nice documentation including diagrams that help you understand your database at a quick glance. Usually, they can also suck a live database back in (reverse engineer) to help you document whatever nasty hack you've inherited from your predecessors in a legacy application ;-) MySQL Workbench is what I really want, or something similar. I just happen to already have a copy of Visio Enterprise Architect that comes close enough to doing the job, so I use that until Workbench is up and working properly on Linux. I hack the generated SQL scripts (minimally) to make them MySQL friendly, and I hack the generated RTF data dictionary files to make them more to my liking, and load them into OOo and embed the ER diagrams, to get nice, easily referenced documentation on my DBs. See here for more information about data modelling tools in general, and a couple of specific ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-relationship_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_ERwin_Data_Modeler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER/Studio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_Data_Modeler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_Workbench -- Ross McKay, Toronto, NSW Australia "Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water" - Wu Li -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
