Randolph West is looking for a product for database modeling and tries out dbForge Studio:
These days I still design new databases from scratch with pen and paper (or iPad and Apple Pencil), where the entity relationship diagram (ERD) is rudimentary and crows’ feet relationships are badly-scrawled. But it got me wondering which database modelling tools are on the market today (commercial and free).
My ideal tool should be able to design a new database from scratch and generate creation scripts in T-SQL without failing over common issues like referential integrity and dependencies. More importantly though, it should be able to reverse-engineer a database (like Microsoft Visio used to be able to). This is extremely useful for consulting engagements when I need to get a picture in my head of the database I’m looking at. This was the one place I’ve used the Database Designer in SSMS more than I had initially remembered.
Randolph also mentions SQL Database Modeler, which I used on a consulting engagement where I wanted to replicate Visio’s database reverse engineer functionality.