DbDesigner

- The Linux/KDE2 visual database designer

What is DbDesigner?

If you need to build complex SQL databases you will find DbDesigner quite a useful tool. It allows you to construct your DB in an intuitive and easy to use environment, where you have a visual representation of the tables and relations contained in your project. You can quickly see the fields in a table or how each table relates to the others. After you are finished, DbDesigner can export the schema of the database into an .sql script, or directly connect to a database backend and build it there. It can also import already existing databases from .sql scripts or db backends. Of course, it can save your project into its native format (XML) so all information is kept (for example you can't save the positions of the tables in the workspace into an .sql script). Due to its plugin architecture, DbDesigner is easily extensible to work with many database servers. By default it comes with 2 plugins: one for PostgreSQL and the other for MySQL.
On the other hand, if you are building complex databases you might have already seen products like this one. So you may ask why another visual database designer? That's easy: because I haven't seen one for the Linux platform so far. Somebody had to "scratch the itch" sometime...

What is DbDesigner's development status?

DbDesigner is currently under development, but a first release is close. The project was started on April 28, but the effective development time was around 9 days (as of May 21). Watch the News section below for more details.

News

Thu Jun 14 00:40:47 EEST 2001 - PREVIEW 2

I have just released public preview #2. This package includes several bugfixes and adds sequences and views (not sql views). The Changelog is available here. Plugin architecture is almost ready. I will be busy for the next couple of weeks (exams) but after that I'll do my best to release a beta version ASAP.
Note: It looks like on systems with qt compiled without kde support DbDesigner fails to compile. If you get errors about "invalid use of undefined type `class KIntSpinBox'" when compiling, please add "#include <knuminput.h>" at the beginning of dbdesign/metaseqedit.h. This will be fixed in the future release, sorry about it. Thanks to Lefebvre Herve for reporting this bug.

Mon May 21 00:48:00 EEST 2001 - PREVIEW 1

The first public preview is available here.
Almost complete table and relation handling. Saving and opening native files works, as well as exporting the project to an .sql script.
TODO:

Import from .sql script
Import/export from/to database backend
Plugin interface
Implement relation validity checking
Code clean-up and speed-up
Fix polygon drawing routine

Thu May 10 04:27:08 EEST 2001 - Tables and relations

You can successfully create/edit tables and relations. No save functionality yet. Type checks for keys are not implemented yet. Some screenshots:

5 tables and 4 relations. Here you can see all the visual elements used to represent the database. DbDesigner uses colors and shapes to give the user as much information about the relations as possible. The tree on the left contains all the objects currently on the workspace.
One more screenshot to show that the relation slots (the colored dots on the margins of the tables) have fixed positions, so you can quickly identify keys.

You can find the Sourceforge project info, bugtracking system, online cvs browser and all the other cool stuff here.