Comments on: ER Diagramming Tools

By: Fredy Stocker

Fredy Stocker — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:47:38 +0000

Hi Ceci
I have a problem using DBDesigner4 to reverse engineere an Oracle Lite 10.1 DB. Could you give me any hint ?

Thanks a lot

By: Ceci

Ceci — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:27:15 +0000

I have tried the DBDesigner4 from FabForce. I did a reverse engineering from Oracle 9i and it worked fine!!!!

I really like it

By: Jon Emmons

Jon Emmons — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:36:01 +0000

Ivan,

I have done a reverse engineer with Oracle and I don’t remember having to go through ODBC to get it. It was limited to tables, primary/foreign keys, indexes and the like.

I don’t think it would be possible to get an accurate representation of functions and procedures by reverse engineering. You could extract object dependency but it would be difficult to get much more than that.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:24:00 +0000

Jon,
Have you even tried to reverse engineer an Oracle database using Visio 2003? For some reason, I keep getting a fatal error when I try it. The only way I can extract info out of the DB without an error is to use the default ODBC Generic Driver, and with that, I cannot extract more than the tables, primary keys, indexes, and foreign keys.

Great for if you want to create a nice diagram of your tables and their relationships, but totally useless if you want to create some nice diagrams from your stored procedures/functions and the like.

By: Jon Emmons

Jon Emmons — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:03:18 +0000

Meesk,

I haven’t tried Xcase. Perhaps I’ll try to find an evaluation copy of it. Thanks.

Jon

By: Meesk

Meesk — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:02:20 +0000

Hi Jon,

Did you tried Xcase Database Design ? It provides great support for Oracle at a reasonalbe price ($799).

Best wishes,

Meesk

By: Colin Morris

Colin Morris — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:06:18 +0000

You know, with all the Javascript movable objects and AJAX around at the moment, I’m surprised nobody has made an HTML ERD diagramming tool. Would be great for quick things, rather than what you’re describing, but it’d be a great exercise.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 13 May 2006 01:08:45 +0000

Thanks John! I’ll have to take a look at that once I get a free minute. Could be a while…

By: John

John — Mon, 08 May 2006 13:04:30 +0000

What about DeZign for Databases (from Datanamic)? I’ve only tried it out using the free trial, but I have a friend who swears by it…

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:58:16 +0000

Yeah, I've used it and also like it. (You actually showed it to me) The problem with it is it does not support Oracle. It says it does, there's even a popup where you can see an Oracle option, but it doesn't work. With luck, Oracle will rewrite Designer ala SQL Developer and make it better and free.