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Closed 10 years ago.
We are using PowerDesigner at work for database modelling. But there is a hell of a price tag on that piece of software. And frankly, all I use is physical diagrams for MS SQL, which is about 1% of what PD knows.
Are there any good alternatives? I know about Visio and MS SQL Diagrams, but looking for other options.
Power*Architect is the way to go. It's free, open source, and does a really great job helping you build your ERDs. Plus, it works on Windows, Linux, and OSX.
Open System Architect: www.codebydesign.com - it does job for me perfect
Check out Sparx Enterprise Architect also.
I just use SQL Server using the diagrams folder. The designer is pretty simple to use, and can be used to generate tables fairly quickly. Considering it's free with the software, I don't see the issue.
SourceForge.net Druid project
Has a templating engine to produce DDL or what ever you like.
Has the ability to have multiple diagrams in one model.
Only does physical data model.
It is free and has source available.
It is a java based tool so it will run on Unix or Windows.
How about MagicDraw? It is a very powerfull tool, but I think it as expensive as PowerDesigner, not sure.
You might want to look at https://www.xcase.com/demo.php. It's not free, but it's quite a bit cheaper than PowerDesigner, as far as I can tell. I've used earlier versions, but lately I've had easy access to Visio, so have continued with that instead of investing in xCase.
The version of Visio that comes with VS Enterprise Architect has a forward-engineer feature that will generate SQL. There is also a type library for the modelling engine, but (on older versions at least) it won't extract certain items such as comments. However, the generated SQL has the comments in a fairly simple structure that does facilitate parsing the generated SQL.
You can get older versions of VS enterprise architect on E-bay for not very much money (I think mine cost about £250).
One caveat for reverse-engineers is that all pre-VS2005 visio DB modelling engines will not play nicely with the SQL Server 2005 native client. You need to either script out the database and re-load it on a SQL2000 server (dealing with SQL2005 specific features such as schemas is left as an exercise for the reader) or get a more recent version.
Well there's another alternative. Use it for more than just making tables! Exploit it, get your money's worth. You've already paid for it, you could drop the maintenance and just use it as-is. Anyways, something to ponder.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have a relatively complex set of VB6 forms and classes that need conversion to VB.NET. The classes are complex across COM boundaries, supplying interfaces and events, and sinking events from other COM classes.
None of the classes marshal variant or other complex data types across COM boundaries, so I don't need to try and do anything really difficult with the interfaces.
Are there any tools available, free or commercial, which can automate that, given a copy of VS2010 and a wallet full of money for utilities, but not consulting services?
Please see a question I asked once similar to this here: VB6 code upgrade. Look at the answer from Olivier Jacot-Descombes who talks about the tool available in Visual Studio.
I would suggest rewriting the code as in my experience it is time well spent.
I had a similar task to do and for me the simplest way was to upgrade the VB6 code to .Net using the wizard in Visual Studio 2005. Then upgrade the project to Visual Studio 2010 and then use a refactoring tool to extract the interfaces.
No need for expensive third party tools although you'll still have to manually check all the interfaces to make sure nothing has been missed out.
Spend the money on VB Migration Partner or Artinsoft VB Upgrade Companion and let the tool convert the code as well as extracting the interfaces.
You obviously need to parse the VB6 code, and extract name and type definitions. There aren't a lot of robust VB6 parsers around.
We have one of them, built on top of our reengineering tool foundation, DMS. You can get these as products, and configure them for your purposes. The VB6 front end provides parsing to full ASTs with all details; DMS provides additional machinery useful for building symbol tables, doing type analysis, and support data flow analysis, which is likely what you'll need if you want to know which interfaces use which. This isn't any easy task, as these pieces of machinery are fairly complex (due that the fact that real programming languages such as VB6 are complex); most people are more interested in services to just make a migration happen but situations vary. See VB6 migration tools. (I'm the CTO behind DMS).
You can always write a Perl script to try and extract this information. This will likely get it right 70% of the time; your energy will be spent in trying to figure which 70% is correct, how to patch the other 30%. If your system is pretty small, this might be easier.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I am going to develop an application for OS X and I need some scripting engine for it.
The purpose of the scripts is to receive a text on their input (HTML file in most cases), parse it in some way and return the data to my app. These scripts should be easily editable by the users, therefore they should have some common used syntax like C or pascal.
Can you suggest some lightweight solution for this?
Thanks!
PS. I am new to OS X development, trying to switch from Windows...
Two suggestions:
Javascript, try the V8 engine. http://code.google.com/p/v8/ Very popular, likely familiar syntax to many.
Lua. http://www.lua.org Extremely lightweight and simple to connect. If your script editors write scripts for World of Warcraft, for example, they will know Lua.
In general AppleScript/Automator actions are easy for the end user to work with since the technology includes a GUI for building scripts without much programming knowledge. For experienced developers used to other languages, they can be a bit too friendly/loose and have a somewhat different syntax (more like plain English). The good thing is that they can also call other languages as needed, so a developer familiar with Perl or whatever could incorporate that into an AppleScript or Automator action.
Since you're talking about parsing text, Perl itself would be a good solution - again there's some difference in syntax, but the scripts can be rather compact and the basics of parsing aren't too difficult to learn. I haven't personally incorporated Perl into an OS X app, I've just used it on the command line, so I don't know if there are any pitfalls to that approach.
One additional advantage to AppleScript is that you can make your application itself scriptable so that users could automate the functions of your application into a larger workflow.
I would suggest downloading the free TextWrangler application by Bare Bones Software, or a similar developer's text editor, to see how they incorporate scripting into the application. This may give you additional insight into your approach.
LUA seems to be a good choice.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have a bunch of C code accessing database (Oracle, DB2 and Sybase) through Embedded SQL : the base code is the same, but with three different precompilers, three sort of executables are built, one for each database/platform.
I works perfectly fine, but we need now migrate to a solution using ODBC access.
The problem is : what tools / api can be used ? A direct way seems to write a custom precompiler (or modify an existent) to wrap all SQL and host variables calls to calls on an ODBC connection.
Can somebody recommend tools for that task or api to keep it simple ?
Or is it a simpler way, another approach ?
Thank you
As is usual for such situations, there are likely no off shelf answers; people's codebases always have a number of surprise in them, and the combination prevents a COTs tool from ever being economical for individual situations.
What you want is a program transformation system (PTS), with a C front end, that can be customized to parse embedded SQL. Such tools can apply source-to-source rewrite rules ("if you see this pattern, then replace it by that pattern") to solve the problem.
These tools require some pretty technical effort to configure. In your case, you'd have to adjust a C front end to handle embedded SQL; that's typically not in C parsers. (How is it that you can process this stuff in its current form?) You'll have trouble with the C preprocessor, because people do abusive things with it that really violate a parsers nested-structures-view of the universe. Then you'll have to write and test the rules.
This effort is a sunk cost to be traded against the effort of doing the work by hand or some more ad hoc scripting (e.g., Perl) that partially does the job leaving you to clean it up. Our experience is that it is not worth the trouble below 100K SLOC, and that you have no chance of manual/ad hoc remediation above 1M SLOC, and in between your mileage will vary.
At these intermediate sizes, you can agonize over the tradeoffs; that costs energy and time, too. Sometimes its just better to bite the bullet and do it any way you can an clean it up.
Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is one of these PTS. It has a customizable C parser and preprocessor, precisely to help deal with these configuration troubles. The other PTSs mentioned in the Wikipedia article, do not, I beleive, have any serious C parser associated with them. (I'm the guy behind DMS).
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Closed 11 years ago.
I brought 31 queries down to 3 for a certain page in my application by using a single join (provided by Django's ORM). Up until that very moment I thought of SQL optimization as something I didn't need to worry about. I instantly realized that there are probably so many areas that run slow which could use some SQL tomFOOlery (SQL FOO is for professionals).
Now I'm looking for a piece of open source software that will allow me to quickly create databases, and tables with a GUI, so I can quickly add data and experiment with queries. Is Access good for this (aside from not being free or open source)? Or, does Access use it's own SQL syntax?
Oracle XE is free.
MySQL is free. For MySQL i use MySQL Workbench which is pretty nice.
If you want to practise SQL, I guess any database/tool would do. But learning how to optimize for one database doesn't translate into knowing how to optimize for another. I'd say go with the database you are currently working with.
There is a Firefox add-on for SQLite Database. This is a very small add-on and once done, it allows you to create database, the tables and the data visually. Pretty simple one at that.
SQL Server is an obvious choice for Windows. You can download Express Edition for free but if you want a development tool then the Developer Edition is much better value. Developer Edition typically costs around $50 - much cheaper than Access.
SQuirreL SQL is a nice and free software that supports many databases.
I'm not sure if you can create tables visually, but from my experience, it's faster to just write the DDL and then execute it since it's a one time job.
As for data generation, I've found http://www.generatedata.com/ to be a nice online site where you can generate dummy data.
No one mentioned SQLExpress. You can use SQL management studio, and it's free. Good enough for practicing. You can create databases visually and write stored procedures etc. It also integrates with Visual Studio express.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Over the years, I have tried many times to find a good, easy to use, cross platform tool for some basic software system diagramming. The UML tools I have tried seemed to get in my way more than help. So far, the solution I keep returning to is Visio, which is both Windows-only and expensive. Although its far from ideal, it does provide some basic building block and allows things like grid placement and zooming. I wanted to see if there is a great tool out there that I'm just missing that fits at least some of the criteria mentioned.
Graphviz FTW!
What could be more hardcore than writing a text file to convert into a diagram etc...
GUI, we don't need no stinkin' GUI!
You could try DIA, though it is a bit basic it will keep out of your way when doing pure diagrams.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/
Well, I guess you mean for Windows. Otherwise for the Mac, nothing I know can beat OmniGraffle. Not only it is so easy my grandmother could use it, it can actually make really "beautiful" diagrams. It is really not too expensive (version 5 is now $99, but older ones used to be less than $40; still got a cheap one) and it can do it all, network diagrams, flow charts, UML digrams, UI mockups, etc. The app is clever, it thinks for you in a way, e.g. it will detect that you try to align objects on a line or have equal spaces between them and offer you hinted drag'n drop to make sure these criteria are met. As I said, it's really easy to work with OG.
And it can even also existing Xcode project (the standard Mac IDE for programmers) and automatically generate graphs from your source code. A complete UML chart by just pulling your Xcode project onto the icon :-) I guess it would be great if they could port that to Linux or Windows, but I'm afraid it will never happen.
Enterprise Architect (http://sparxsystems.com) is the best and very affordable.
I've used Edge Diagrammer... It does what you want simply and quickly. Supports grid placement and zooming. It's Windows-only, and it's gotten more expensive than I remember, but still cheaper than Visio.
I like Visio
If you have to use software, Visio is my favorite. (I get it for free through my school's CS program)
But... I find the best tool out there is a 17" x 11" sketchpad, sure it's made for artists but nothing beats a massive piece of paper for figuring out design problems.
The most productive diagramming, in my experience, is done on the whiteboard.
I capture in Visio, though, it has more tools and shapes than anyone else, and you can extend it to do code generation.
Sometimes I use yEd. It is a Graph Editor, but it is perfectly able to be used as a diagramming tool.
MagicDraw is quite good IMHO.
The best free solution that I'm aware of is Dia. It's marketed as a casual Visio replacement.
There's also Kivio, which I've heard good things about but haven't personally used. That one's multi-platform and free.
I use Violet UML Editor for most of my diagrams. It's not cluttered with code reverse engineering and code generation features and makes creating elegant simple diagrams very easy. Best of all it's free.
TopCased http://www.topcased.org/index.php
BOUML: http://bouml.free.fr/index.html