[OT] Re: For Windows platform: which Dia plugin or App to simplify design and documentation of small Database Applications ?

[Thomas Harding <tom thomas-harding name>]

Le 27/10/2012 02:40, Andrey Repin a écrit :
> Greetings, Paul Smith!
>
> > @  Andrey
> > Thank you for your suggestion of MySQL Workbench.  Interesting lead.
> > With MySQL in the name I had assumed not worth investigating for use with
> > HSQLDB (when choosing a RDBMS I was looking for one adhering closely to SQL
> > standards and suitable for a low power platform such as a nettop, so I
> > rejected MySQL as read it was not very compliant, also the Oracle takeover
> > sounds bad news for it).
Greetings Paul, this discussion is largely off-topics here, but your 
initial question was how to
design a /simple/ database.

In order to, with Dia you must use for UML sheet, with classes and 
relations between, then specific scripts (I guess they are numerous now) 
in order to generate DDL from Dia file.

I'ts a long time I didn't use and I can't remain the whole, but as far 
as I know properties has 2 parts, and if I remain correctly in the 
second were placed foreign keys and constraints.

You could find convenient information on that docs scripts themselves :)

About SQL servers, hardware requirements depends essentially on how 
large are the data and how complex is the database (also for MySQL you 
can use table which do not handle relational (FK) model at all).

As said, you can tune MySQL and designed databases for a small 
footprint, while you'll loose even "relational" in some cases.

If databases are fairly large and complex, PostgreSQL is the better 
choice, offering advanced models,  also numerous languages (for stored 
procedures and triggers), and it occupies what it really needs, and 
numerous connectors (including odbc, unsure of jdbc).

MS SQL is a fork from initial Postgres branch (have been given also 
Ingres, which AFAIK turned back Free Software), then... years ago, MS 
SQL main engineer said "we failed" (about what some queries /should/ 
returns). Hardware requirements are simply huge regarding db contents.

What I know of Oracle it is: you need a database engineer (doing select 
bluk from V$database where... n times with n V$ tables / fields just to 
get schema is stupid, also I heard tablespaces can grows now 
automatically but... this is just a sample of the nightmare what you'll 
get). Last but not least : it is proprietary, there is a restricted 
"free beer" version, but costs are simply astronomical.

There are also "appliances SQL databases engines" such as libraries, but 
you'll need to implement anything else by program, and they are intended 
for "standalone" appliances.

Last, I'm quite surprised how big is a needed machine to run a simple 
server with Windows as OS :)

Best Regards,
TSFH