Free/cheap PowerDesigner alternative?

Question

We are using PowerDesigner at work for database modelling. But there is a hell of a price tag on that piece of software. And frankly, all I use is physical diagrams for MS SQL, which is about 1% of what PD knows.

Are there any good alternatives? I know about Visio and MS SQL Diagrams, but looking for other options.

Answer 1

I just use SQL Server using the diagrams folder. The designer is pretty simple to use, and can be used to generate tables fairly quickly. Considering it's free with the software, I don't see the issue.

Answer 2

You might want to look at https://www.xcase.com/demo.php. It's not free, but it's quite a bit cheaper than PowerDesigner, as far as I can tell. I've used earlier versions, but lately I've had easy access to Visio, so have continued with that instead of investing in xCase.

Answer 3

The version of Visio that comes with VS Enterprise Architect has a forward-engineer feature that will generate SQL. There is also a type library for the modelling engine, but (on older versions at least) it won't extract certain items such as comments. However, the generated SQL has the comments in a fairly simple structure that does facilitate parsing the generated SQL.

You can get older versions of VS enterprise architect on E-bay for not very much money (I think mine cost about £250).

One caveat for reverse-engineers is that all pre-VS2005 visio DB modelling engines will not play nicely with the SQL Server 2005 native client. You need to either script out the database and re-load it on a SQL2000 server (dealing with SQL2005 specific features such as schemas is left as an exercise for the reader) or get a more recent version.

Answer 4

Well there's another alternative. Use it for more than just making tables! Exploit it, get your money's worth. You've already paid for it, you could drop the maintenance and just use it as-is. Anyways, something to ponder.

Answer 5

Power*Architect is the way to go. It's free, open source, and does a really great job helping you build your ERDs. Plus, it works on Windows, Linux, and OSX.

Answer 6

Excellent Idea!

Answer 7

Open System Architect: www.codebydesign.com - it does job for me perfect

Answer 8

SourceForge.net Druid project

Has a templating engine to produce DDL or what ever you like. Has the ability to have multiple diagrams in one model. Only does physical data model. It is free and has source available. It is a java based tool so it will run on Unix or Windows.

Answer 9

Check out Sparx Enterprise Architect also.