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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

#81

Post by laowantong »

My own tool adopts a mixed approach to the layout problem : diagram-as-text, but the line breaks and the order of the boxes (entities and relations) are used as position hints. The resulting layout is constrained to an invisible grid corresponding to a left-to-right and top-to-down reading of the source.

Moreover, since there are relatively few possible grid positions, automatically rearranging the layout becomes an assignment problem, which can be solved by a simple b&b algorithm.

Obviously, this wouldn't scale, but this is just a teaching tool that I use to present small ERDs to my students.

You may test it at https://mocodo.net. Click the turning arrows symbol to draw the diagram and the shuffle symbol to rearrange it randomly.

Warning: French-flavored ERD, aka Merise MCD.

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

#83

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Ah, diagrams from text. Every few months I look into producing slides, and look for something that saves me from having to use a mouse-intensive tool like PowerPoint or KeyNote, preferably using Markdown. There are plenty of tools to make markdown slides — slidev, Marp (esp w VSCode extension), HackMD, etc. But for diagrams I haven’t converged on a good workflow. Maybe mermaid is worth spending time with.

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

#84

Post by sbuttgereit »

tejtm wrote: post #45
sbuttgereit wrote: post #36

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…

I used SchemaSpy to great effect for many years, till someone decided it was abandoned and took it over. When I tried again it had become shockingly bloated presumably in the name of modernity. I just wrote a one pager for the SQL dialect I was in and moved on. I get that it is java, and bloating is considered normal but as the original author proved, it does not have to be that way all the time.

This could well be the case, but to be honest I'm not too concerned by that. So in short, it may not be a well engineered product, but it seems to do its job well enough which is all I really care about as a user.

My usage pattern is to run it on a workstation (usually my personal workstation or laptop) and take the result and put it somewhere useful. It's not a perpetually running process or something I'd run on, say, a production machine where any bloat could produce meaningfully negative results. Those results are also not something I'm too worried about for things like bloated web pages or so... at least insofar as the audience for that result is fairly limited and the user experience isn't something I see as hurting usability. Any extra time it takes doing its job because of any inefficiency doesn't really impact me either; once I'm at a point I can set it running on a database, I haven't found it to be terribly long running, I don't run it often, and usually I can just do other stuff while it's running (a few minutes or so).

I haven't found anything open source that produces as good a result and its commercial competitors aren't any better in any sufficiently meaningful way... unless you want to start talking about database documentation being integrated into larger, consolidated requirements/documentation tools.

If anything I'm pleased that someone did pick up the maintenance and that new database features and the like have some hope of being supported... and without maintenance the result -would- eventually come to suffer as things in the database world moved on.

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

#85

Post by biziclop »

text2db wrote: post #79

Something similar made by me (text2db) long time ago, cannot maintained it, but if someone wants to continue, code is available on github https://stackblitz.com/edit/web-platform-hxc9oz?file=index.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hYtZ38wuz4

[dead]

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

#86

Post by kholdstayr »

npack wrote: post #50
kholdstayr wrote: post #32

Is it possible to resize a table in the diagram? I work on a database that has a column name of "order_module_order_num" and if you try putting that in the text doesn't fit. The text runs into the data type.

The table will expand automatically to fit its contents. So wider columns like order_module_order_num should work just fine

I'm not seeing this at all. Here's a screenshot:

https://imgur.com/7T0cLO5

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

#87

Post by fallingmeat »

Nzen wrote: post #17
fallingmeat wrote: post #5

neato! 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"}"

Thanks! fixed it now that I'm back from vacay...
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