The Daily Bits

A few nights ago I was looking to start on a new project that involves a pretty big database However I didn’t want to draw out my database design by hand. The choices are: use an editor like Paint (can’t do that no paint on a mac), use Adobe Illustrator (ok but a bit of a hassle), or find something new, I chose the latter. After some googling and seaching digg I found two good utilities.

Omni Graffle - A Mac application that lets you create flow charts and mind maps. It also have a section for database modeling. I havn’t found out if it can span multiple pages yet… If it doesn’t I may have to go back to Illustrator.

OmniGraffle isn’t exactly that shocking…

What’s more amazing is this. It’s a web application made with AJAX that allows you to design database tables. It has the ability to create foreign keys (fields that point to a primary key in another table, a primary key is basically just a unique value in a table) but for some reason it lakes the creation of relations Relations are key to any database design. Visio can do this but there is no free or decent replacement for it.

So without a doubt I’ll be using both of these on this next project

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PS: Today is First Contact Day!