theKompany.com's Data Architect Reviewed

JigSaw writes "Clinton De Young reviews for OSNews the premier theKompany product, Data Architect. The product allows you to design ODBC and other databases under Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, utilizing the Qt toolkit."

Alternatives

[Fux the Penguin]

Gnome-DB is another such application, but it is not as advanced: Gnome-DB [gnome-db.org]

And then there is Aqua Data Studio [freshmeat.net] too, which is also multiplatform and free.

Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is free?

[NickV]

Not only does DBDesigner4 [fabforce.net] seem to do everything Data Architect does (cross-platform, SQL generation, importing/exporting from databases), but it's also free.

And it's prettier too.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[Randolpho]

Hear here! I personally love DBDesigner4; it's quite pretty and does everything I need it to.

I occasionally have problems printing landscape with the damn thing, but on the whole it's a damn good proggy.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[ameoba]

You beat me to it. Damned good program, other than a few minor UI quirks and some minor printing difficulties.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[dtfinch]

And if you're willing to shell out 5 times a much cash and be stuck with Microsoft's database offerings, Visio does a lot of that too.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[NeoBeans]

I just wish it was available on Mac OS X...

It would seem

[hding]

from its webpage that DBDesigner4 only supports MySQL, whereas this offers support for more databases. That could be an explanation, as not everyone uses MySQL.

Maybe for OS X support

[justMichael]

DBDesigner looks promising, but they don't have an OS X build. I'll give it a shot if it will build, we shall see.

And as mentioned previously, DBDesigner only supports MySQL.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[prashantp76]

DBDesigner4 looks great- I'm quite impressed by the UML-like modelling capabilities. I wonder if they wrote this part of the code from scratch or re-used another GPLed modelling tool as a starting point.

Re:Why would I pay for this when DBDesigner4 is fr

[fabforce]

I build it from scratch :)

Thanks people for using DBDesigner4 and posting so many good things about it - you're welcome!

You may also want to take a look at the DBDesigner4's forum:
http://www.fabforce.net/forum

And some of you might be interested in the SimpleWebFront Plugin... just take a look at http://www.fabforce.net/simplewebfront/

About the name ...

[vorwerk]

Sybase has produced a suite of tools called PowerDesigner DataArchitect for quite a long time. (I remember using an older version when I worked at Sybase many years ago.)

For example,
sybase eshop [sybase.com]

I was just thinking that trademark issues may arise from the products being so similarly named (and have somewhat similar goals).

(My guess is also that Sybase's product has been around for a longer period of time.)