Oracle SQL Datamodeler (OSDM) is a new tool that Oracle acquired a few months ago from a belgium company called cdw4all. This tool will be bundled with sql developer and could be the new Oracle tool for datamodeling.
There is no production version for the tool yet (thats scheduled for calendar year 2009), but there are early adopter versions available. The current early adopter version is EA2.
It is possible to import data from a designer environment and in this post I will describe how this works. I must say, the process of importing designer objects is straight forward.
I'll import from an Oracle Designer 10gR2 with versioning disabled. When you want to import from a versioned repository make sure that your objects are checked-in. I installed a new Designer repository, created a new application system with two entities (emp and dept with a relationship) and used the database design transformer to create two tables with a corresponding foreign key.




After that I started OSDM and chose File --> Import --> Oracle Designer model.
First you have to make a database connection:



Select the correct workarea



Select the application system(s) with the workarea



Select the objects you want to import (in this case entities and tables)


and the last step: Generate Design



We are finished. Let's look and the results. In the logical model (Entity Relational Model) I got my two entities and in the Relational Model (data diagram) I got my two tables:





Wow that was easy!

This little demonstration was made with Early Adopter version 1. I tried it with EA2 but in this version I could only import entities...