DB Designer 4

It has been a long time for me to look for a free (better if open source), user friendly and powerful ERD editor. Most of the foundings are trial version, limited version, non-open source, or not so user friendly.

But this week, it seems God wants to give me a gift - DB Designer 4, which is an open source, user friend and powerful DB designing tool. It support connections to various data sources, e.g. MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle and ODBC, execution of queries, reverse engineering on db design, forward engineering by applying the change in db design or generating SQL script. You're also allowed to export the diagram in to PNG or BMP, which would be useful for documentation while some other tool doesn't export any graphics...


DB Designer 4

StarUML

Half year ago, I found this tool very useful for system design and documentation. Six months later, I still think so. StarUML is a free CASE tool for OO Methodology, supporting UML, MDA, and both forward and backward engineering. The tool is planned to support round-trip engineering, which I'm interested in very much. I hope the tool can be continued with its development and we can see the power of round-trip engineering at the days.

StarUML

My recent thought

Recently, I thought of a system framework to allow us to develop software in the same way as how chemical factory works. It will be nice if I can implement the framework, and then show you the interesting idea. Hope it won't be too late for you.