Data modeling

So I've decided to do more coding, now that our lives are rearranged in Europe (see, we're renting a house that doesn't need renovation, and there's public transit so I don't have to play taxi driver for the whole family every freaking day, and so on).  My first coding target is to revamp my job management system for the translation business.

Here's the problem whenever I start to code anything: I always want to develop the tools to develop the tools to ... infinite regress.  It's a bad, bad habit.  But what's got me going today is that, since I had to move my database from Access into SQLite (long story, but: my Access is 32-bit and I'm now running a 64-bit Perl; you cannot get from one to the other.  At all.  Microsoft wants me to upgrade to a 64-bit Access and I ain't gonna do that) - anyway, I touched SQL and now I'm well into fiddling with database design.

Which brings me to data modeling tools.  In Perl.  And here - just like in every other thing I dabble in - I find that Dave Freaking Rolsky is ahead of me.  Twice.  Once with Alzabo (when asked, he tells me Alzabo is a doornail, a dodo, its metabolic processes have stopped), then rewriting it entirely in Fey (which is just still too Perly for me to use without distraction).  But, like all things Rolsky, he seems to be off doing fantastic things which are not the things I initially wanted to do.  Alzabo did indeed include at least a rudimentary data modeling tool, but Fey is just an ORM.  A really fine ORM, it is true, but that's not (all of) what I'm after.

No, I want a database-agnostic way to model data, play with it, move it around, restructure it.  Then, once I really like it, then I want a Perl ORM, and one I can use without all that { this => 'that' } in it (in short, of course, Decl).

So back to the Goog I go, this time dropping my insistence on Perl, hoping at least to find some inspiration and maybe a tool I can use without any time investment at all.  I find this compendium, which at least manages to convey to me that there is a whole lot of money in data modeling.  But I knew that.  And it does give me a helpful link to SQLDeveloper, which might be kinda-sorta what I'm looking for, at least to get off the ground.

(Update: nope, it still isn't what I'm looking for.)  (But here's the Wikipedia page on data modeling, which is a pretty cool page.)

Along the way, it also shows me the fascinating Reverse Snowflake Join diagramming tool, which when given a complex SQL statement can discombobulate it into a diagram, and a site filled with interview questions, including Perl data modeling questions.  Yes, it's a whole site devoted to kata.

So that's my brain dump for the day.  Thanks to my foray into online AI classes, followed by a spring chock-full of travel, it's been about eight months since I did any serious coding.  I can feel the brain cells dying.  Maybe there's still hope, though.  Wish me luck, hypothetical reader.