Database Design Tool with Some Rails Smarts

Posted by Mike
Liquid error: wrong number of arguments (5 for 2)

SQL Editor is an entity relationship diagram (ERD) tool for OS X with a tie-in to Rails. This might be of interest to folks who want to bring complex database designs into a Rails app, though I think there might be some mismatch there between the idea of big design up front and Rails more agile TDD approach. Anyhow, the idea is that SQL Editor lets you build this:

SQL Editor screenshot

And with a single save operation get this:

Migration screenshot

SQL Editor certainly doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the high-end ERD tools I’ve used under Windows, but for a $69 shareware package it’s serviceable enough. In addition to generating Rails migrations, it can export DDL for MySQL, Postgresql, or Oracle, as well as reverse engineer existing databases via JDBC.