a Database Design Software

Making software is a hard job. Making a good software is harder.

Making a good software that works right instead of blowing apart is even harder. Making a good software that works right and maintainable is __unbelievably__ hard.

Joel even once said that "Good software takes 10 years. Get used to it".

Now, at the heart of this huge task, there is at least one poor person who has to turns all specs, requirements and design documents to code that works. You might imagine what kind of pressure this poor person feels.

So, for this person, a good helper utilities, editors, compilers, IDEs, or maybe a nice comfortable chair and desk (that could also work as a bed) will be highly appreciated. With a better editors (such as vim!), "syntax errors" would be spotted earlier and would prevent nasty bugs that may later became very impossible to track.

One of the tools that is really helpful in the process of creating a database-backed software is a database design software. And for the last weeks, I have manage to found a _very_ good database design software that suits my needs perfectly. It is called DbWrench from Nizana system (http://www.dbwrench.com).

DbWrench can do lots of nice things for me, it manage to "reverse engineer" my databases perfectly. You change something from inside the database server itself? No problem, DbWrench can synchronize the changes. What if you do changes inside DbWrench? Well it will help you to "forward engineer" the changes to the database server.

DbWrench has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and MS-Access databases. And it also has this very-very nice diagram relationships editor. If that's not enough, the diagram is also exportable to PNG or JPG. A perfect tool for helping not only in database designing and application development processes, but also in documentation processes.

Only downside of it, is that it is not (yet?) a free/open source software, it's build using Java (which might costs you extra memory, but hey, your memory is more important, right?) and the license costs quite a bit. But if you work on a software development company that needs a good database designing software or in badly need for such a tool, then DbWrench is highly recommended.