Jetbrains has their own mermaid plugin they started working on recently, and honestly, I’ve found mermaid to be really all I need.
Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#12We've been using https://dbdiagram.io/ , which also has an open-source markup language: https://github.com/holistics/dbml
Every engineer I know have been using DBML for a while. Did they fail their market research ?
Edit: Damn, it really look like they were copying dbdiagram.io, down to the FK relationship syntax. Not cool.
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#13We've been using https://dbdiagram.io/ , which also has an open-source markup language: https://github.com/holistics/dbml
I've used DBML and like it as well. There's a small ecosystem of tools that support it, and I think the additional structure with curly brackets makes for fast "eye parsing".
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#14We've been using https://dbdiagram.io/ , which also has an open-source markup language: https://github.com/holistics/dbml
Every engineer I know have been using DBML for a while. Did they fail their market research ? Edit: Damn, it really look like they were copying dbdiagram.io, down to the FK relationship syntax. Not cool.
It does look VERY similar, but I think they tried to make the language a bit more terse. As a said is another comment, I think the slightly additional structure is actually better.
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#15Thanks! I was writing a FastAPI/SQLAlchemy+SQLModel/Rocketry app this week and dreaded documenting my model relationships. That said, I see a few SQLAlchemy extensions and Pydantic→Mermaid projects that can probably be used in my case, and that was the route I was initially planning on going down despite none of them being aesthetically pleasing.
Many of these online tools reasonably rely on human input to place tables/nodes. Do any of these recommended tools do a decent job of smartly laying out the final diagram?
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#16We've been using https://dbdiagram.io/ , which also has an open-source markup language: https://github.com/holistics/dbml
ive been a keeping a list of other diagramming tools too https://github.com/swyxio/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#di...
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#17neato! anyone interested in a collab on a more generic natural language graph making tool (think GoJS powered by LLM to make SysML diagrams etc). Demo of api here, I cant do front end, it is a weakness… https://grapher.baselines.cloud/ hit me up on linkedin: /in/thenatefisher
This needs better instructions for the expected syntax. With nodes a and b, I tried "a -> b", "a to b", and "a hates b".
Each complained "{"detail":"AttributeError(\"'str' object has no attribute 'copy'\")","error":"PERM_SRV_ERR"}"
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#18Thanks! I was writing a FastAPI/SQLAlchemy+SQLModel/Rocketry app this week and dreaded documenting my model relationships. That said, I see a few SQLAlchemy extensions and Pydantic→Mermaid projects that can probably be used in my case, and that was the route I was initially planning on going down despite none of them being aesthetically pleasing. Many of these online tools reasonably rely on human input to place tabl…
Agree, We could do some improvements to Auto-Layout. Our tool does remember your layout adjustments
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#19We've been using https://dbdiagram.io/ , which also has an open-source markup language: https://github.com/holistics/dbml
dbdiagram is definitely an useful utility. Some of the differentiators would be:
1. Simpler Syntax
2. Fully Local processing (This tool works offline, once you load the original web page)
3. Light weight & fast (the entire project is 20kb in size)
Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool
#20I love tools like this (text to diagram) and tend to use mermaid for most things. I also really like draw.io which includes a gui and has integration with GitHub to save diagrams directly to a source repo.
Is there a solution that has direct, bi-directional integration with Postgres/MySQL. For example, execute DDL from the diagram or point to an existing db and output the diagram text?