Dia for professional UML modelling

Question

Dia is an excellent open source tool for UML modelling. I am currently using it for drawing ER diagrams. But the home page of Dia Dia has this to say about Dia "Dia is inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use". Dia is pretty slick tool and I am using it for designing ER diagrams for my database schema but the above description contradicts my perception about Dia. Is there any set standards for professional ER and casual ER??. ER is a just a notation for our understanding isn't it or I am missing something??.

Answer 1

The "professional" ER tools (Erwin, Power Designer etc.) will let you generate DDL from your models and/or reverse engineer a diagram from an existing DB or DDL.

Dia doesn't do that - it just lets you draw pictures. However, as long as that's all you want then I wouldn't have any reservations using it. I use both Dia and visio extensively for these kinds of diagrams and have had no issues. (In many ways they're more flexible as you can annotate diagrams with symbols that don't strictly belong in ER notation).

hth.

Answer 2

Dia itself doesn't do SQL/DDL, but there's a whole bunch of tools that converts Dia diagrams into SQL/DDL for various databases (and programming languages). Just have a look at https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/Links