I couldn’t resist sharing this tool with you. “FabForce’s DBDesigner 4″:http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/. Released under the GPL, with versions for Windows and Linux. Yes, *FREE!!!*
I’ve only been using it a for 10 minutes so far, but it seems to be well designed. The interface is a bit clunky when creating tables (I’d have expected to move you from one column to the next, not from the current row to the row below) but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
And other parts that are confusing are due to my lack of knowledge in this area - I’ve no idea what the difference between the relations 1:1, 1:1 generalization, 1:n, 1:n non identifying and n:m are. All I want to do is show that the user_id column on one table is related to user_id on another 
Documentation is pretty good (OK, outstanding for an Open Source project) and I’m reading that now… will post an update later on when I’m more familiar with it all.
6 comments ↓
I’m going to check this out, but I thought it would be useful to mention SQLYOG which I am using with MySQL and apache. I find it excellent.
I found your site (you guessed it) . . . from Zeldman! Nice work! Every bit as good as Clagnut, and easier to read!
I’m working on my own site at the moment, so I’ll pass you a link when it’s done. Come to think of it, I’ll probably post a link to Zeldman himself . . . oh and then there’s Eric Meyer too!
bq. I found your site (you guessed it) . . . from Zeldman! Nice work! Every bit as good as Clagnut, and easier to read!
Thanks for the kind comments Peter. As you can probably tell the site’s still work-in-progress, and looks like it will remain this way until I find a decent tool that allows link management as well as blog entries.
Am I listed somewhere on Zeldman? I can’t see any entries in my logs or on his site, so I’m intrigued by the comment
If you don’t know what the 1:1 and 1:n relationships are…PLEASE go get a book on relational database modeling theory. These are basic concepts…and I’ve had to go and re-do more data model messes…in production, due to them being designed and implemented by someone who doesn’t know basic modeling theory…and normalization…
You’ll be happier in the long run…
Not a slam..but, please do learn a little…
Any book you can recommend? I’ve since bought:
* ‘Practical Web Database Design’ Pub by Glaushaus (read _some_ of it)
* ‘An introduction to database systems’ by C.J. Date (read _none_ of it)
Are these OK or are there others you would suggest reading?
My suggestion? “Read the manual(Click here to download it.)”:http://www.fabforce.net/downloadfile.php?iddownloadfile=4
Also check out this site: http://database.ittoolbox.com/
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