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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/

SQL isn't the only way to talk to a database. Xplain is an alternative: http://www.berenddeboer.net/xplain/index.html

http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ - a tool to generate special-purpose databases in C. Very fast, not relational.

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/

http://www.izzysoft.de/?topic=oracle - orarep is a script that generates a nice-looking report about an oracle database instance.

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://www.59uptime.com/db/index.html - a Java GUI to build database schemas

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.

http://wfb2sql.sf.net/ - a neat idea - a script to translate the CIA World Fact Book into SQL.

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/hierarchical-data.html - Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL

Representing Database schemas in XML

There are many XML schemas for representing relational database metadata:

http://www.w3.org/XML/RDB.html - article on w3c website.
Gaudi (see above) 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
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/sql/ - Jakarta Commons SQL project
http://dewdrop.sourceforge.net/ - XML schema and tools for generating DDL
http://www.pimentech.fr/en/technologies/outils