I already blogged about Oracle decision to release SQL Developer Data Modeler as a free product. I would certainly never shell out 3000$ (original Oracle price) for the license of Data Modeler, because the product is simply not worth that much, especially compared to 479$ Data Modeler from Quest, a product that is imho at least as good as Oracle Data Modeler, if not better. Now that Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is a free product it certainly deserves to be evaluated. I’ll probably use Oracle Data Modeler in my next pet home project and if I found something worth writing about I’ll publish it here in the comments section. For now I just want a working copy to sit on my desktop, waiting for some free time on my part.

Downloading and installing Data Modeler on my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx was a breeze, because I already downloaded and installed JDK 6 for SQL Developer.

Steps for installing SQL Developer Data Modeler:

$ cd /home/alesk/Downloads
$ sudo unzip datamodeler-2.0.0-584-no-jre.zip -d /oracle
$ sudo chown -R oracle:dba /oracle/datamodeler/
$ cd /oracle/datamodeler
$ sh ./datamodeler.sh
-- the first time you run the script it'll ask you to
-- provide path to jdk installation directory, in my case:
/oracle/jdk1.6.0_21

That’s it. The only thing that remains to be done is to create new desktop launcher. SQL Developer Data Modeler starts surprisingly fast, considerably faster than SQL Developer. Screenshot example:

One of the first thing I checked was for which databases we can generate DDL, the list is much shorter compared to Quest Data Modeler, but for the mainly Oracle shop it’s more than adequate: