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Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

databasediagram.com

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Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

#31

Post by sexydev »

jrm4 wrote: post #30

When I see things like this, now my immediate question is always: what's the underlying model? Is this like a generally open and free thing, with maybe a little bit of monetization to keep the lights on? Then that's great. But, if this is looking to be a big moneymaker? eh, nah.

Absolutely right!

Everyone launching a beta version of their product says its free. You invest time learning and migrating things over and by the time they catch up on features, pricing page shows up.

I have been using https://www.erdlab.io for 6 months now and so far it looks like they are true to their word. The developers on ERDLab have fulltime jobs and treat it as a side project but still push out updates and handle maintenance in a timely manner. I want them to succeed but not so much where they start to think about making money lol

Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

#34

Post by kapv89 »

Great ! I am also excited to share ERDTOOL built in this space - https://erdtool.com ... - Multiplayer entity-relationship-diagramming tool - think Figma of ERDs - Supports Postgresql and MySQL (mysql part is new homepage hasn't been updated to reflect that) Building it solo. I hope this will also interest the tech community

Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

#36

Post by sbuttgereit »

From what I can tell, a lot of these tools seem OK for capturing relatively simple database designs, but at least "look" fairly inadequate for more robust needs. This makes sense if you're trying to use a GUI for creating a database: there's going to be limits to how much you can accomplish easily with that approach so being robust for smaller databases works out.

Most of the time I want an ERD tool it's to capture a database that I've already built for documentation purposes, or to document a database that someone else has built and that I need to come to terms with.

For this I use SchemaSpy (https://schemaspy.org/). I let it reverse engineer the database, build the diagrams, etc. I like the way it organizes what it captures and that it will do things like capture in-database object comments and put them in sensible places; for example, this lets me use the PostgreSQL COMMENT ON * commands to add contextually relevant documentation in the DDL and this tool will do the right thing when I generate database documentation.

Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

#37

Post by fzeindl »

digitalsanctum wrote: post #20

I 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?

See https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/ for a list of tools!

Re: Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool

#38

Post by mih »

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

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