Are there any good free or cheap Oracle database diagramming tools?
I need to display an oracle database and I hope to find good tools that are either cheap or free.
Ideally, the tool should allow me to link relationships between tables as well as remove unnecessary tables from the diagram.
I already have access to MS Visual Studio 2008 as well as SSMS 2008 but I don't believe they will be of much help in oracle.
I asked this question here on serverfault and I had multiple answers. However, after trying most of the tools, I ran into problems with all of them.
I prefer SQL server over oracle, but I have one oracle system to use for management, and I am in an upward battle against the many errors the oracle is throwing at you by the minute.
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Have a look at TOADSoft and especially Toad Data Modeler (Toad is a very famous tool).
Another well known commercial tool is PL / SQL Developer . It is a more integrated solution (not just graphical modeling).
In both cases, I have not checked the prices, but I am sure they are worth it (and the prices should be negligible compared to the Oracle license).
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Like your friends at serverfault, I had a really good experience with PowerArchitect . And it's free.,.
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Visio professional will let you reverse engineer your database schema, and I've done this before with Oracle. This is actually a good idea for this, as you can organize the diagram by subject area (i.e., on separate pages). You can also annotate charts with missing foreign keys; this is a pretty useful feature for defining vendor databases.
Enterprise Architect will also let you generate DDLs on diagrams, and you can often get VSEA2002 or VSEA2003 quite cheaply; these versions come with the EA version of Visio.
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I think Visio has a feature called Reverse Engineering with which you can specify a database connection and it will automatically execute the diagram for you. The database connection can be any available through ODBC.
(MySQL also offers such a feature in its MySQL Workbench, although I don't remember if it could have been possible to specify a different database system other than MySQL itself)
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Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler has "Free Download, Free to Learn, Unlimited Assessment", whatever that means.
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While we mention pencil and paper, I'll take the next step away from pencil and paper. This is MS Access.
If you have MS Access on your PC, and if you can customize table references from MS Access to Oracle, you can use MS Access to create relationship diagrams that you can print. You have to do quite a bit of manual work compared to some of the more expensive tools.
Set up a blank MS Access database. Then set up a table reference for each of the tables in the Oracle database. Then use the Link to Access tool to draw relationship lines between each foreign key and the key it references. Classify each relationship as much as possible. This creates lines between the fields. You can use the Access interface to drag and drop fields on the chart until you like the visual layout. You can print the resulting diagram.
Oh, and by the way, you can create local tables to act as snapshots of some data and MS queries to reload local tables from Oracle data. This way, you can communicate with local copies without writing to the Oracle database. You can even set up links to the SQL database table and move the data in half.
Depending on the complexity of your Oracle DB and your diagramming needs, this might be enough tool for you.
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