DB Designer 4

DB Designer 4, an open source DB design tool developed by fabFORCE.net, compares according to their website with tools like Erwin, Rational Rose and Oracle Designer.

For MySQL databases this is true. In conjunction with Oracle, DB Designer 4 still has some shortcomings. For example it is not possible to select “Oracle” as the default database type, although it is listed under -> DB Designer Options -> Database Options. Whenever you try to select “Oracle” it jumps back to “MySQL”. Other options are ODBC, SQLite and MSSQL, neither of them can be selected.

It is still possible to connect to an Oracle database. Reverse engineering of an existing schema works very well, see the picture above. But it is not possible to design tables and then synchronize them with the database to create them directly. However, a CREATE TABLE script can be copied to the clipboard or a file, but since it is designed for MySQL the script has to be edited for use with Oracle.

DB Designer 4 can be downloaded for Windows and Linux here, documentation can be found here.