SQLEditor makes it easy to design a database. You can quickly create tables, add fields, edit field attributes and determine relationships between tables. SQLEditor’s visual display helps you understand the relationships between your data.

For example, I’m building a simple, web-based task management app that makes it easy to manage to-do lists (more on this later). Here’s what the database design looks like.

As you can see, I have three tables (users, lists and todo) with various data fields and 1-to-many relations between users and lists, and lists and todo. That is, one user can have many lists and each list can have many to-dos on it.

After visually creating the database, SQLEditor can then export directly to a database or it can export SQL commands to a file. Here’s the SQL commands needed to create my database.

These commands could be written by hand, especially for simple databases like the one I’m using in this example. However, for large, complex databases, database design tools like SQLEditor are indespensable. They remove alot of the work in building databases for web apps.

What do you use to build your databases?