Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Best database modeling tool for PostgreSQL

First off:

  • This tool is not free of cost (but not too expensive). No free tool came up the my requirements. Feel free to tell me if you know any. 
  • By database I mean PostgreSQL .... of course :) 
  • My requirements:
    • Should connect directly to the database. With ability to reverse engineer the design from the database as well as the ability to send the design to the database. 
    • Should be able to export the model to its own format and be able to generate a change script between two files generated from the same script. This will allow a database + file pair for each revision of the software where the table structure changes. 
    • Should provide options for setting up naming conventions. 
I will not go into all the softwares I tried ... since to be honest I gave each software's trial version a limited run. But one came out on top as a CLEAR winner : 
ModelRight Professional 3.5

One note though. To get it to connect to PostgreSQL i needed to add the "bin" folder of my PostgreSQL installation in my windows "Path"
Note: I didn't run the windows installer for postgreSQL ... i used the method here . The postgreSQL windows installer might do this but I haven't verified.
ModelRight suggest that I could have also just copied "libpq.dll" to the installation folder of ModelRight (in my case C:\Program Files (x86)\ModelRight\ModelRight 3.5 Professional) but that did not work for me. 


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