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Relational databases aren't cool, but they are hugely important to businesses around the world. I've been involved with databases for quite a while, in some cases actively pushing their limits.

Lately, the most interesting database I've used is Postgresql. Dumb name, great product. http://www.postgresql.org/

Oracle is big and ugly, but so are Mack trucks. Both are useful. Oracle runs on Linux, there are some products to help with this process at: http://www.orasoft.org/

Documentation

This tool builds javadoc-like pages from an Oracle schema. I'm not sure that this is a good idea in general (better to generate docs from the source code), but it could be extremely useful for reverse-engineering. http://oraschemadoc.sourceforge.net/

Development

http://www.memoriapersistente.pt/en/opensource/gaudi/ - a Java tool for visual development of database tables.

http://www.danny.cz/datadesigner.en.html - visual tool for designing database tables, plus a back-end which can translate them into SQL. Gaudi looks better.

http://erw.dsi.unimi.it/ - a web-based tool for database maintenance. Also an excellent example of clean web design using CSS.

http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/ - tools to manipulate MS Jet (.mdb) databases and move their data into real dbms's.

http://senora.sourceforge.net/ - a command-line tool for Oracle with a plugin architecture. Aims to replace sqlplus (which would be a wonderful thing to do).

http://dbmonster.kernelpanic.pl/ - DB Monster generates large quantities of random data which can be fed into a database and used for stress testing.

Representing Databases in XML

There are many XML schemas for representing relational database metadata:

http://www.w3.org/XML/RDB.html - article on w3c website.
http://www.memoriapersistente.pt/en/opensource/gaudi/ - a Java tool that has its own schema for database metadata.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsqlml - XML DTD and XSLT sheets for various databases.
Hibernate has an option that generates DDL from the hibernate mapping file.
http://erw.dsi.unimi.it/ - has their own schema
http://www.danny.cz/datadesigner.en.html - has a schema

-- TobyCabot - 23 May 2002