Does anyone know of a good SQL Designer that will do both reverse engineering and forward engineering that is both stable and mature???

What are you guys using to design the actual database structure and manage it through the application life-cycle...

Well not exactly sure what you are looking for, but I use Red-Gate sqlcompare to syncronize our prod and development databases. Take a look at the demo and see if this is what you are looking for. It does not provide anything for designing, we just use the SQL Management Studio and Enterprise Manager for that.

Visio with its ORM designer (object role modelling that is ).

I've been using Visio, but it is so..... slow. Saving a model takes 10 minutes with 30 tables (and some times it just fails). Looking for alternatives as well to create a db module. Any sugesstions.

I use erwin for modeling and sql packager to script new databases and db upgrades. Once we begin development, all objects are scripted and put into our CI process. Every time we do a build, the db and all objects are re-created. The same process is followed for nightly, and QA builds.

for production releases we create a package using sql packager comparing the most recently approved qa database and the current production database.

in my current environment, development teams do not deploy to production servers, only infrastructure can do that.

new development, design, and modeling is done with erwin. when the model has been approved, we script the objects related to the new subject area(s) in question and integrate the new subject areas into the CI process.

Devildog74 wrote:

for production releases we create a package using sql packager comparing the most recently approved qa database and the current production database.

How do you handle changes that can not be done with a simple compare tool?

BOb

Fortunately we havent run into this scenario yet. Sql Packager literally looks at all objects in the schema.

I suppose that if we ever run into it, we will need to get a production DBA to run pre-upgrade scripts on the production database, then run the upgrades.