TerraER For Mac

TerraER is a straightforward and Java based modeling application that was designed from the ground up to help you build ER (entity-relationships) models.

It wouldn’t be misguided to say that TerraER was created to help students or other type of users to learn the basic concepts of data modeling, especially in a field like software engineering.

Once you start TerraER, you will notice that it does not come with the slick interfaces, streamlined and intuitive layouts, or the smooth effects you've been accustomed to when using macOS apps and, instead, you will be welcomed by a fairly common Java interface.

And that's not all, as another downside that we must point out is the fact that the application lacks any sorts of official documentation, both on its website and in its Help menu.

Despite the fact that the interface’s floating Drawing and Positioning toolbars have no real element to hang themselves of the main board, they do a good job of displaying TerraER’s small set of tools.

The Drawing toolbar provides you with quick access towards a selection tool, and also enables you to add entities, weak entities, relationship, entity relationship, roles, attributes, attribute connection, key attributes, derived attributes, and multi-value attributes, optional connections, disjunctions, overlapping and generalization connections, just to name a few.

Despite its user-interface, working with this application is not easy, but not very hard either, as it enables you to drag and drop, move, rename, resize, and rearrange almost every element. With the help of the contextual menus, you can also copy, cut, rename, duplicate any element with ease.

Another thing you should know is the fact that TerraER enables you to export your projects, regardless of their size, as XML files.

Taking all things into consideration, TerraER is a simple open source application that works well as a learning tool for students that have to study data modeling. As a downside, the app is not what you would call user-friendly or intuitive (on the macOS platform at least), and this automatically translates into a steeper learning curve until one can be comfortable working with it.