Re: Best open source tool for database design / ERDs?

dananrg(at)yahoo(dot)com wrote:

>Seems like the open source data modeling tools aren't feature-rich
>quite yet.
>
>
Disclaimer: this is probably *not* what you want, but I will throw it
out for completeness.

We have a non-graphical tool that builds databases out of text files
that resemble CSS, such as:

table customers {
column customer { primary_key: Y; }
...
}

Very likely we share the same purpose as you do, to capture data
structure outside of DDL. But going further, we designed with nothing
less in mind than to capture the entire system requirements in the
database spec, including derived columns and other automations, and
including security as well. A generator builds the DDL.

Going one better, the generator also works as a diff engine, so when you
make changes it generates the DDL to change the structure and also the
trigger code to enforce the rules.

The twist is that we found when the file format was complete and the
features were in we really didn't need the GUI. We may put one in
someday, but jedit is our GUI now :)

So if you are at all willing to consider non-GUI tools that aim for the
same purpose, you may wish to check it out:

http://docs.secdat.com