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Business Idea: Online Data Modeling Tool

July 18, 2007 By Jason Kolb 4 Comments

Moneyfallingfromthesky_2 Man, if I only had the time to actually build all of the ideas I have I’d be a disgustingly rich man.  But I don’t, so they end up on my blog :P

Someone really needs to build an online AJAX-driven data modeling tool (a la Embarcadero ER/Studio, or ERWin).  If you’ve never used one of these for your software development you don’t know what you’re missing, because the data model really is the foundation for the application (especially if you use code generation utilities, which are just cool as all hell).

I love using them, but it drives me up the wall that I have to use a fat Windows app to do it.  That makes collaboration even more difficult because usually to hook multiple installations together you have to purchase some kind of uber-expensive enterprise package that usually only works over a LAN anyway.  I would be in heaven if I could use some kind of Google Apps type of online application to do data modeling and collaborate with other people.

So there it is, somebody please take this idea and run with it, this is a market just begging to be disrupted.

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Filed Under: Business Intelligence, Ideas, Software Development, Technology, Web 2.0
  • http://www.embarcadero.com Greg Keller

    Hey Jason! Greg Keller here from Embarcadero….and one of the original people on the ER/Studio team from 'back in the day'. I owned the product from its inception to through a few years ago before handing it off to some really great up and coming PM’s who are running with it. You know, I've seen web-based modeling tools done as a research project (I’ll see if I can dig it up), all done pre-AJAX of course, and the results were indeed interesting. I have been tinkering with this idea for some time as well with respect to the new Web2.0 and SaaS models I see on the horizon and in practice (think SalesForce.com and Amazon's latest approaches). Functionally I think we are at or at least damn close to leveraging browser based controls and widgets to satisfy the end user experience. Before, there was just not enough fidelity to make it compelling for the end user. A less than rich experience. I think this has been fairly effectively handled though with AJAX and like technologies. The prior poor UI experience combined with a fairly deep persistence mechanism for all of the (meta) data that is required to be captured and then rendered within the model accounted for too many stumbling blocks. It’s complex to say the least having built one of these puppies before. We are in the age of the VM though and it may satisfy this to the extent by allowing a SaaS session of the web based modeling tool to be instantiated, a VM session also kicked off with some sort of persistence mechanism launched in the VM, and thus the complex array of model data properly captured and managed behind the scenes. Great post though and certainly something to consider as we mature the space.

  • http://eastman1.blogspot.com DE

    Give me a fat app anyday. I can't understand why you would want to do anything serious on a website. Bad UI, incoherent POV, unsteady persistence.

    By all means improve the middleware – don't blame the app.

  • anonymous

    cf http://ondras.praha12.net/sql/ for a preview of what such a tool could be

  • honza

    You can use Online Data Modeler, http://data-modeler.com