Visual data-modeling tools for H2

[Stefan Scott]

What sort of tools do people use for visual data modeling with H2?

It would be great to have a tool which allowed the developer to draw E/
R diagrams, and visually build queries - and then output DDL for H2.

I'm currently evaluating Toad Data Modeler - which doesn't
specifically support H2, and doesn't include a visual query builder -
but it does have "user-defined templates" which might be usable in
order to generate DDL which works for H2.

[Nico]

Hi,

You may look at eclipse DTP : http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/
even if I don't know exactly what visual features are available in.

[Thomas Kellerer]

Have a look at Power*Architect. It doesn't have a graphical query
builder, but is a decent ER modeller. It's OpenSource and free.

You can connect to an H2 database without problems (by manually
setting up a new JDBC driver) and the Generic-SQL92 dialect should
work good enough for H2.

http://www.sqlpower.ca/page/architect

The team is pretty open to suggestions, so I'd think if enough people
ask for "direct" H2 support, they'd probably do it.

Thomas

[Bogdan Maryniuck]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Stefan Scott
<StefanSc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What sort of tools do people use for visual data modeling with H2?

I use NetBeans... Maybe you could look at: http://db.netbeans.org/ HTH.

--
bo

[Stefan Scott]

Thanks for the replies so far - I'll look at the data modeling modules
for NetBeans and Eclipse - should be interesting to try them out since
I'll probably be using one of them to work in Lift/Scala as well. I
did download Power*Architect already and was somewhat put off by what
I felt was a clunky interface - but that was just a first impression
so I'll go back and have another look at it.

Like I said, Toad Data Modeler for modeling tables seems promising
because it has this template language which seems like it could allow
generating arbitrary DDL from a model. And there's also Toad Data
Analyst which I tried out, and it lets me build queries visually. But
of course, this is not open-source, and it's a few hundred bucks.

I'm a data-centric kind of guy - I come from a database background,
and I tend to think in terms of building a (visual) data model first,
either using an E/R tool (entity-relationship modeling) or even more
abstractly an ORM tool (that's object-role modeling in this case - not
object-relational mapping!) - and then from this model I'd like to
generate my SQL DDL - and it would be cool if it could generate the
class definitions for a Java or Scala front-end. But who knows how
practical this all is.

Anyways thanks for the suggestions and I will keep on evaluating them!

[Stefan Scott]

Thanks - the tree view on the page http://db.netbeans.org/ which you
sent me certainly looks very reassuring.

They don't mention H2 explicitly - just Hypersonic and HSQLDB. I'm
curious if you've been able to connect to your H2 database and do
simple insert / update / delete operations?

I just did a google and found a "Netbeans H2 plugin" so that looks
encouraging.

I plan to work in Scala/Lift and I hear that Netbeans is the best IDE
for that - so maybe I'll be able to do everything in NetBeans, which
would be nice.

On Mar 29, 7:08 am, Bogdan Maryniuck <b.maryni...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Stefan Scott
>

[Stefan Scott]

But hey - on the Netbeans H2 plugin page at Google Code - there's no
downloads. Is this vaporware?

Anyways, are you able to get NetBeans to talk to H2 already somehow?

On Mar 29, 7:08 am, Bogdan Maryniuck <b.maryni...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Stefan Scott
>

[Bogdan Maryniuck]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Stefan Scott
<StefanSc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyways, are you able to get NetBeans to talk to H2 already somehow?

Sure. I am using it actually. Just select a generic driver and you're in.

--
bo

[Ewald]

Hi.

I set up a JDBC connection to the H2 database (Server mode) and am
doing all my database operations directly from the IDE. It's a breeze
to create new tables or view data, and the tree view makes it easy as
pie to navigate the database.

Simply register the H2 driver in the database view by right-clicking
on Drivers, selecting the H2.jar file and selecting the driver by
clicking the Find button. Give the driver a name, like H2 Driver and
click OK.

Now that the driver is registered, you can connect to any H2 database
by right-clicking on Databases and selecting the H2 driver from the
list. Enter your username, password and the JDBC connection URL (see
the excellent H2 tutorial in the docs) and there you are!

From here you can create tables, execute SQL-commands, view and update
data and even grab table scripts to recreate them with later if you
deleted them from the IDE. Handy stuff indeed!

Regards
Ewald

[Bogdan Maryniuck]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Ewald <ewal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I set up a JDBC connection to the H2 database (Server mode)

Just one thing: if you use H2 as embedded mode, you will need to
restart NetBeans, because after connection closed, it still actually
keeps it for some reasons. But it is valid for other db engines as
well, e.g. Derby.

--
bo

[ArturoMS]

Try SHUTDOWN command before you close the connection

On Mar 30, 6:32 am, Bogdan Maryniuck <b.maryni...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Thomas Mueller]

Hi,

> Just one thing: if you use H2 as embedded mode, you will need to
> restart NetBeans, because after connection closed, it still actually
> keeps it for some reasons. But it is valid for other db engines as
> well, e.g. Derby.

That doesn't sound right. What database URL do you use?

Regards,
Thomas

[Bogdan Maryniuck]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:48 AM, Thomas Mueller
<thomas.to...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That doesn't sound right. What database URL do you use?

jdbc:h2:file:/path/to/the/file

--
bo