Week 3 wrap up

CASE tools can be used to automatically generate SQL from an Entity Relationship Diagram. In order for this to work, you need to specify attributes, keys, and cardinality accurately and completely. The CASE tools that maintain some kind of Repository are able to do this. When you use a drawing-only tool such as Word or Powerpoint, you will need to create the SQL during implementation by hand. 

One tool discussed was the MySQL Workbench.  Database Management Systems (DBMS) such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL server are expensive to license for production applications.  MySQL is an open source DBMS and can be used in production systems without paying a license fee.  MySQL was recently acquired by Sun.

The CASE tool Toad can be used to draw ERDs and generate SQL.  The drawing part is free but it is necessary to license Toad3 to use other features such as generating SQL.