Comparative Analysis of Data Modeling Design Tools

Abstract

Conceptual modeling describes the physical or social aspects of the world abstractly, encompassing the interpretation of data production, gathering, visualization, and analysis. The quality of the data analysis system will limit the excellence of any decision-making process. Thus, accurately specifying the physical data model is essential. The primary goal of our work is to compare tools that can create this physical model. We recognize several types of data models, but we only include the relational data model. We evaluate free and commercial data modeling tools. But it is challenging to decide how to compare them and which elements are crucial. We propose a new approach for software tools' evaluation based on the Business Readiness Rating (BRR) model and the OSSpal evaluation methodology. In this work, we show that this new methodology can be tailored to the needs of each individual developer or team, thus providing proper and meaningful results. Also, by applying this hybrid approach to the evaluation of data modelling tools, we show it can robustly handle the bias from lesser relevant evaluation categories.