Wednesday, October 22, 2008

E/R Diagramming : OK, OK, I get it!

Gads, someone else asking for E/R diagram support. We have 36 votes for this in Issuezilla. What is it with you guys?

First of all, MySQL Workbench really owns this space. Yes, I know, right now it only runs on Windows, but the next release will fix that. And, yes, I know it only works for MySQL, but the promise is that they will fix that too, albeit not right away. 

Secondly, NetBeans DB tooling has a huge opportunity because we're part of the IDE.  An E/R diagram tool doesn't really leverage that advantage.  There are things we can do that will make your day-to-day experience of slogging code for database applications really nice.  But we can't be doing that if we're spending all our time writing an E/R tool.

That said, we're looking very seriously at a simple read-only E/R plugin. First and foremost what people want is a way to understand the structure of their database and to communicate this to others. Being able to build a database design through visual tools is useful, but has a secondary order of demand.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled to this space, all you E/R lovers.

1 comment:

AnjanBacchuDev said...

"Being able to build a database design through visual tools is useful, but has a secondary order of demand."
+1.

Most developers want something to understand a DB themselves. Then, want to print and show to others and document, etc.
Lastly, they want to use that for creating and maintaining the DB.