cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

Moving to Eclipse 3 - I Wanna be a DB Architect

(A preview of the End of the Entry: I was going to write about Eclipse as DB Tool, met with more barriers, but I'm finding success in flexing my Eclipse muscles re: extensibility).

Fine, I'll push off my XML project(s) even more, let's tackle something that has been nagging me at work and I need to get to ASAP. For round-trip database modeling, structured changes, and documentation, we currently use Visio for Enterprise Architects - a nice package, it suffers a bit for three critical (to me) issues:

1. Only works with an older version of Visio (2002, I think)
2. Doesn't cover everything I need from a modelling perspective - specifically, permissions
3. I can't change an existing DB object's owner (I've even tried to hack the drawing objects with VBA, but the object model isn't well documented.

Yes, I know the answer may be PEBKAC, but I would like to get more folks in my department involved with hands-on database modeling in a controlled (ie. source control, documentation, design standards) manner, so if I can locate a cheaper tool, I'm in. I will admit that I love the documentation features of the Visio approach; my DB diagrams can be well structured and self-documenting if I really pay attention.

So, I'll look through the Eclipse plugins out there, and see what I can come up with. I'm never sure how to browse these lists of plugins - by rating? by date last changed? I am looking for something powerful, but also something that is actively supported and (preferably) Very Low Cost. I've noticed that you have to read very carefully - my target database is MS SQL Server, and (not surprisingly for the open source community) you have a reasonable chance that MS is not on the supported list. I had to skip one or two because of that, finally settling on Clay Database Modeling, which doesn't clearly state that it supports MS SQL Server, but I did have some luck after installing the thing.

It's not as easy to use as the Visio tool - at least, I'm fairly confident that I need to practice more. However, the installation process reinforced two key things I'm finding consistently in the Eclipse world ...

1. You typically have to install "something else" to get anything going. In Clay's case, it was the MS JDBC driver for SQL Server, whch makes sense, and was admittedly easy because I had previously played with Druid. Still, none of these plgins have been super straightforward to date.
2. Use the Installer - but look, it's not documented! Well, actually it is, but many of the plugin sites / documentation pieces that I've read over the past few weeks seem to be written for the Installer of a previous version of Eclipse. The current one is quite easy to use, fairly intuitive, you can figure it out if you're reasonably techie.

For the time being, I can't aggressively move to Clay, but I will be playing with it and checking out some other tools. Visio seems safe (for now) ...

posted by James P. MacLennan at 3:15 PM | Permalink | 0 Comments