On a related note, if anybody is looking for a mature source but with a substantially worse UI, I've been referencing the Library of Free Data Models [1] for years.
A great interface, but I see one huge omission - a place to discuss or comment the patterns. A pattern doesn't live in vacuum, it is good under certain circumstances and bad in others. So the pattern is only valuable to me if it comes with an explanation of what it's trying to achieve and why it looks the way it does. Link it up to Stackoverflow or at least throw in some basic commenting function and this would be a useful tool.
this.
The db pattern repository is a great idea but there must be a place to discuss or at least be able to list pro and cons, intended usage, and pitfalls.
Just providing a schema and a name for the pattern is a way to get started, but it doesn't tell me why this pattern is a good fit for what I'm trying to achieve.
Change the price of a product then calculate last months revenue.
I'd also like to see a brief about what the pattern is trying to solve and why it is the way it is. I've used patterns for sortable hierarchical categories before which is more complex than a parent/position relationship. That would take a bit of explaining with regards to querying, sorting, inserting, removing records.
But all in all, I like it. Nice clean UI and can see it growing.
If you are looking for good books on data modeling patterns, I recommend these:
David Hay's Enterprise Model Patterns (and his earlier ones). This is a beast of a book, but has some great patterns.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935504053/
Len Silverston's Data Model Resource Book Vols. 1, 2, 3. Good case studies by industry in the last 2 books.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0471380237/
Michael Blaha's Patterns of Data Modeling . This one has some interesting temporal, graph, and tree models.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1439819890/
Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns. This one skims some of the other patterns, but gives accounting a solid treatment.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201895420/
They are all well-rated on Amazon and I have read them and they are all very good. A few are available on Safari too.
It would be cool to have sample SQL queries for certain common inquiries and some more complex ones. How to find all articles tagged as "programming"? What about all articles that have both "programming" and "timesaving" tags? What's the average amount of time between a friend request being sent and accepted?
Great idea and nice design. If anything, I can find it useful as a starting point. But it would be good to put some requirements behind the designs. Meaning here is what was required designed to allow us expand this or that direction, etc.
Site went down while I was using it, however, this could be very interesting (coming from a database noob). Definitely will keep my eye on the site as long as it's up ;P
EDIT: Noticed you also use jsPlumb. How was your experience with that and did you ever consider other options? I had a few smaller projects that used jsPlumb, but it seemed pretty limiting once my diagrams needed a little more functionality.
I used http://dbdsgnr.appspot.com/ for something like this. It has sql export and it supports a few database engines. If it would allow better forking it would be awesome.
It looks cool, but I don't see the utility just yet. Are there patterns that are very useful, but difficult to come up with just by following one of the normal forms?
I think it's useful for other people to make sure what they're doing alines with convention. For instance, I had no idea about the Library of Free Data Models linked further down the page, so most of the model logic I'm unsure of has been confirmed via Stackoverflow posts. Sometimes, it can be hard to find the exact situation I'm looking for.
Site is down at the moment. Maybe this is a demonstration of the "Crash and burn under load, even though it worked so well when nobody else was using it" database pattern? I run into that pattern way too often, i.e. more than zero times.
