Work Some Database Magic with DBDesigner 4

I wish I had found DBDesigner 4 a long time ago, but it works out that I just found it last week. Have you ever come across a program where you instantly realize that you know it is going to be useful, and it feels like it was written with your ideas in mind. This is what I experienced after installing DBDesigner 4.

I'm a visual person so it really tires out the left side of my brain when I have to create a database through code or phpMyAdmin. That's just the way it is for me, and I've always had a really hard time going back to the databases I've created (especially if it's been months or years) and remembering how they are structured. So I've always thought that a visual tool would be awesome where I can make the database with a visual model and then export the code from that. I've tried various UML programs in past years to do this, but I didn't like any of the ones I tried (mostly because you had to purchase the full product to get key features).

DBDesigner 4 is built for 1 thing - creating database structures (ok, it does query building too, and probably more stuff I'm unaware of, but you get the point). I think that is a huge benefit over the UML programs I used before because there's not a bunch of junk in the program that I'm never going to use. Even better, it is designed out of the box for MySQL databases.

One huge caveat is that it doesn't work with MySQL 5, or even 4.1 for that matter. You see, DBDesigner 4 is on it's way out, and it will be replaced by the much anticipated and much delayed MySQL Workbench project. So for now, I can't even use all of the reverse engineering functions, database connection functions, etc because my local database is MySQL 5. Read more about these issues on on adaruby.com in a post he made in December 2006 (man, I'm really behind on this one). I tried all manner of things to get a current database into DBDesigner 4 from trying to find a way to import an sql script, to using an SQL Lite DB, but I couldn't get anything to work. Hopefully MySQL Workbench is better at this, but I'll have to download that to find out.

Note: This is not a sponsored post, I just think this is a cool piece of software. If you would like a sponsored review, please check out my advertise page.