Free Visual Database Design Software?

Question

I am planning to build a web application that will require a relatively complex database. There are several tables involved with many relationships, enough to make it very difficult to keep it straight in my head. I need a simple and easy way to summarize the tables and illustrate the main relationships so that it visually makes sense to me. I must do this before I can feel comfortable enough to create the database. I remember using some product from Microsoft in college that was great, but I can't remember the name of it and I am sure it costs a bunch of money.

Any recommendations for a free piece of software to help with this (on Windows)?

Answer 1

There's a product from Microsoft called "SQL Express", which is free. There's a component called "SQL Server Management Studio" which lets you create new databases, and create diagrams of databases.

So if that happens to be the great product from Microsoft that you were thinking of, there's a free (as in beer of course) edition of it called "Express".

Answer 2

You can use TOAD for any database you want. It provides a nice GUI that can give you the comfort level for visual design.

Answer 3

Microsoft Visio supports ERDs and Schema diagrams. Assuming you don't have Visio, there's an open source project called Dia which has about the same feature set. Microsoft Access and OpenOffice.org Base can both be used to connect to a RDBMS with ease. As mentioned already, Microsoft also gives away SQL Server Management studio.

I just found a huge listing of data modelling tools. Check it out

Answer 4

If the program you used in college wasn't SQL Management Studio, you were probably using Visio. Open Office's Draw component does a reasonable job building the same kinds of diagrams.

Answer 5

If you were using the Object Role Modeling feature of Visio, then the successor to that is nORMa. It's an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, Standard Edition or above. Still very much a work in progress, but I already find it nicer than the feature in Visio for most purposes.

Answer 6

For MySQL, I really like using DBDesigner4 (http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/) which was discontinued and re-built as MySQL Workbench. Great visuals. It really makes defining relationships easy. Then, once you're satisfied, you can export SQL directly, or have it connect and build the tables automatically for you.