Can anyone recommend a database modelling tool for the Mac? I'm building a new Rails app and want an interface to draw out the database's entity relationship diagram, setup foreign keys and then output DDL at the end to MySQL.
I've previously used DBDesigner, CASE Studio and some pricier enterprise software on Windows, but can't find anything suitable for my Mac. The MySQL Workbench project seems to have stalled and I can't find anything suitable.
Any recommendations?
Thanks
Barry Frost
If you are happy with just creating diagrams and then using Rails migrations to create your database scheme (from my point of view the best thing to do anyway), you could use Omnigraffle.
There’s also DBVisualiser at http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/info.html
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Using ActiveRecord with extra database level stuff like foreign key constraints, multiple-column primary keys, etc. is the Wrong Thing to do. I got burned by this and had to re-write my database schema in Rails 1.1.6. ActiveRecord will enforce most of that stuff for you if you tell it to.
Most of these tools will probably generate schemas that have that extra cruft. They'll also probably not be compatible with migrations.
Just a word of warning...
Multiple-column primary keys does not seem compatible with ActiveRecord as you say.
However, I disagree about not using foreign key constraints. These are wonderful, useful aids to maintain the referential integrity of the DB. When your code violates one, you get a SQL error immediately. It's much easier to fix one of these than it is to try to debug an application that fails intermitently due to data error.
Personally, I have been doing relational database work since the 80's, so I perfer to use dbms tools over rails migrations. Take what works and leave the rest when it comes to frameworks and development tools.
[SQLEditor](SQLEditor for Mac OS X) is not free, but it does nice ERDs and does Rails migrations.
# Damian
Whatever happened to that AJAX one which was specifically designed for rails? ie, it would generate rails migrations and stuff. Someone posted a link to it here a while ago (although searching my mail archives, I can’t find it). That looked promising, even though it was in some kind of pre-alpha stage.
I agree, they are a great help to get a chain of has_many :dependent right. You get an index for that column automatically as well at least in MySQL and a few more, so we use the plugin from RedHill Consulting in all our applications.
-- fxn