Visual Database design Rails [closed]

Question

What techniques, thought processes and tools/apps do you use for setting up a database schema for a rails app?

I'm a very visual person so I naturally start with sketching on paper but I was wondering if there is any good apps (mac) to help me design a relational database structure for my app?

Answer 1

It's not direct answer rather telling our experiences on how we design databases with Rails.

In fact, we never design tables. We design our model. When we make the plan of the application , we plan about the models and their relationships. During the creation of model, we define the fields & their types and rails model generator creates migration file for that. when we run rake db:migrate the database structure is laid. however, after creation of the structure, we use phpMyAdmin (for MySQL) and pgAdmin (for postgres) to see the structures from time to time during the application development. if we need to readjust the fields in future, we do not manually edit the tables rather we create a separate migration (rails migration generator) where we design the changes and rake db:migrate again adjusts the changes.

The above are for the SQL solutions. For NoSQL, so far we've used MongoDB (mongoid). As MongoDB is schemaless, table (collection) definition is easier. In the model, we define the fields and their type.

Summary

So, we never felt like we need any other visualized database softwares. Life is already much fun here.

Answer 2

im justing looking for a visual database design app

You could use either a UML tool that offers the capabilities of modeling and code generation with Class Diagrams (e.g. Visual Paradigm) or use a data modeling tool such as ERwin or PowerDesigner or MySQL Workbench or SQL Server diagrams or VISIO. There are so many tools out there that provides visual database design capabilities and some are free too.

Answer 3

I know exactly what you mean as I like to "see" what I am doing and find verbose methods hard to digest and I always miss attributes. I used a web based tool called Gliffy when I was studying and it looks like it is still going. But it won't play with rails so you still have to type in the code for the model but at least you get an idea of what the classes should "look" like.