Today I’m going to blog about closed-source paid software. Most DBA guys that I knew considered PowerDesigner one of the best tools for database design. Being not a very DB guy I got curious about whether it could be of any help to me. I’ve downloaded a trial PowerDesigner 15 to give it a try. Imagine my surprise when I observed a very good quality support for Hibernate. It seem like PowerDesigner can do all sorts of data transformations and mappings from/to any model. Including mapping data from DB to XML, and of course mapping between physical/conceptual DB and Hibernate. PowerDesigner was capable of generating Hibernate Object-Oriented model from the database schema and construct mappings table. It was capable of recognizing reference tables — they get imported as references (connections) between OO entities. Then the two models stay connected which means that any change to OO model can be propagated to physical model level and vise-versa. So basically it makes it possible to follow DDD and to fine-tune the resulting DB physical model in the best possible way. I’ve seen lots of tools that tried to do ORM mappings, but none of them was even close to what I’ve seen in PowerDesigner. Tools like NetBeans or Idea just not about database design, the best they can do is to generate some sort of Hibernate code from a database, then do code assistance. They are just not about design, however they simplify Java developer life a lot. Of course there is so much more than just ORM capabilities, most notably UML, but that’s not too rare in current market. If I had spare $3,000 I would definitely spend it on PowerDesigner 🙂 Software Development