The birth of VS DATA's Table Designer (by Mairead)

As a relatively new member to the VS Data team, I was unaware of the complete history behind our toolset until recently when my Dev Lead Casey Quayle, one of the founding members of our database tool suite, gave me a history lesson on the formation of our team and our tools [originally the Query Designer, Table Designer, and Database Diagrams] and what our vision was for those tools 10 years ago.

One of the surprising things that Casey informed me about was that originally our toolset was made up of the Query Designer and Database Diagrams. There was no separate “Table Designer” tool, in that if you needed to design your tables, you did so via Database Diagrams. When the VS DATA toolset first hit the streets for the Alpha release of Visual Interdev 1.0, we received a lot of valuable feedback from users requesting us to provide a separate table designer tool for the case where users wanted to create or modify a single table instance. These users did not want to go through the process of creating a new database diagram for the creation or modification of one table only, they wanted a simply tool for this, hence the birth of the Table Designer.

So one of the questions that was playing on my mind since Casey's history lesson, is that, is this still the case 10 years later, where people still require a separate tool for designing a single instance of a table as opposed to doing this via their database designer (database modeling) tool. Basically is there still a need for the Table Designer tool if Database diagrams covers all this functionality?   

If you have any thoughts on this please do let me know...

Mairead