[DISCUSS] Diagram of 60 tables

[Thorsten Hohage]

Hi all,

late, but not to late.

Does anybody know the EOModeler? This is or better was the design  
part of WebObjects. With a real nice graphical interface for table /  
relationship presentation and it works good for 20, 30 tables, but  
the while the app growing it become more and more unusable, you start  
moving things around, not because of "logical message" but because  
there is simply some place left. Then you start breaking down ONE  
model in several "units" to be able to use it again. And most people  
I know about went back to "default" text mode editing, because it's  
much faster, easier, ...

Slightly different for now not be able to describe reason feel real  
professional tools, like Sybase PowerDesigner ;-) - but getting these  
tools costs several thousand dollars. But if there is not a perfect  
match between the tool and the database then even these money makes  
no sense.

So designing the database graphical is nice, but not real that killer  
feature for me.

Presentation is another story, but presentation must not be done by a  
database tool itself. E.g. OmniGraffle is able to read EOModels and  
sketch a nice chart. Then you can use all this nice drawing utilities  
in Graffle to "bitch up the chart" for the management or customer.

So IMHO what really is necessary is the possibilty to dump a database  
schema to XML (I know this works right now) and a necessary  
transformation (it's missing) that Graffle is able to read it. Add  
additional transformators for e.g. UML (tools),  Keynote, ...


Btw. a really nice tool to display and visualize structures is  
oXygen, not only for xml-files, but using the "convert db structure  
to xml schema" - if you don't know the app it's really worth a hour  
to look at it.

regards

Thorsten Hohage
--
objectmanufactur.com - Hamburg,Germany