
Let’s compare these tools in more detail.Īlthough these comparisons are close, I suggest that the three with a fully-functional and bi-directional compare/sync are worth consideration.

Here’s a short list (in order) of tools that I feel are best of breed, lightweight data modeling tools: But if you don’t need advanced capabilities. Moreover, they often offer support for just one or a few of the ERD modeling notations. For example these tools generally don’t have centralized repositories in databases with concurrent model check-out/check-in and conflict resolution.

This category of data modeling tools is best suited for project or departmental usage, but not for enterprise wide deployment. To recap, if your requirements are relatively simple and your budget is constrained, then a lightweight entity relationship diagram (ERD) tool may well meet your needs.

In this blog, I’ll highlight and compare data modeling tools for each market. I answered basic questions such as what is data modeling, why should I care, and what capabilities should data modeling tools offer? I also broke down the major types of tools into two markets: departmental or project-oriented versus enterprise-oriented, with several examples for each market. In a prior blog, I examined data modeling and data modeling tools at a very high level.
