Award Sounds

I was curious about the relationships between Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Potentials, so I needed a reverse engineering package.

Fabforce Designer/MySQL Workbench

FabForce Designer was a great little application on Windows and seems to have stagnated a little under MySQL's auspices. It's recently been released for OS X, but the recent release requires 10.5 (Leopard) and I'm still on 10.4 (Tiger).

I found a 10.4 compatible version although it looks to be quite an early version. I'd like to find a later version that still works in 10.4 and I may keep looking. I then noticed a sentence in the user guide that states you can only reverse engineer from a live database with a commercial licence of MySQL Workbench.

Base

So I thought I'd try Base (from OpenOffice or NeoOffice). That needed an ODBC connector for MySQL.

Had to use the full socket path provided from MAMP for the User connection in ODBC manager, e.g.

/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

Actually looks like OpenOffice has the ability to pick up native MySQL connector as well. That worked well, however there's no graphical database designer. Bear in mind I want this so I can quickly get a feeling for how the vtigercrm database is structured.

Power Architect

Ok, so next option is PowerArchitect from SQLPower. I installed JConnector from MySQL as my route to access the mysql database. Then dragged each group of tables into the playpen and organised them so I could understand how they related. I could have just dragged all the tables into the playpen but then I'd have ended up with a very messy, unintelligible diagram. Doing it manually and watching the output is a great way of getting a quick understanding of the underlying database.

The output

The output is a 7.1Mb PDF. I've been unable to resize it to anything useful. Resizing has generally made the filesize larger, rescaling or outputting to other formats (e.g. jpg, gif, etc) either makes the file size larger or the text unreadable.

I've attached the 7.1Mb PDF, although if anyone can reduce the filesize and keep it legible, then please let me know.