Rails - Apr 2005 - How to create a graphical view of your database?

Hello. This might be slightly off-topic for this group, yet it seems  
so relevant...

I''ve been working happily away at my application involving a number  
of database tables, which Rails deals nicely with. I like that Rails  
has very strong suggestions for naming elements of my database and I  
have no problem adhering to that.

However, along the way I''ve been dully mapping my database using an  
entity relationship diagram, which is extremely helpful to me.  
Especially with Rails, because my app so closely corresponds to the  
structure of my database. However, I feel that having to update my  
diagram every time I update my database is a very serious violation  
of the much-lauded DRY principle.

My question: is there a good way to generate a database diagram from  
my MySQL dumps or directly from my database? Does anybody have a  
favorite, or even a good, way of doing this sort of things?

Thanks again,
Raymond

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 09:26:44AM -0700, Raymond Brigleb
wrote:
> My question: is there a good way to generate a database diagram from  
> my MySQL dumps or directly from my database? Does anybody have a  
> favorite, or even a good, way of doing this sort of things?

I have done something like this myself using Graphviz as the graph
generator. The big advantage of graphviz is that all of the layout
is done automatically - you only need to specify the nodes/edges
in your graph. It works very well on small to medium sized
graphs, but can become problematic of your schema is too complex.

That was for a custom datamodel description language, though. A 
quick search on google suggests SQLFairy. The screenshots look quite
good.

Links:
http://www.graphviz.org/
http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/

www.datanamic.com 

ImportER MySQL - generates a DEZ file for use in...
DeZign for Windows  - graphical ERD app, which can then generate a
script not only to recreate your MySQL database schema, but also to
convert it to other RDBMS...

DataArchitect (www.thekompany.com) might also do the trick with MySQL databases.


On 4/25/05, Joost Diepenmaat
<joost-wg/WqLBuUjRmR6Xm/wNWPw@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 09:26:44AM -0700, Raymond Brigleb wrote:
> > My question: is there a good way to generate a database diagram from
> > my MySQL dumps or directly from my database? Does anybody have a
> > favorite, or even a good, way of doing this sort of things?
> 
> I have done something like this myself using Graphviz as the graph
> generator. The big advantage of graphviz is that all of the layout
> is done automatically - you only need to specify the nodes/edges
> in your graph. It works very well on small to medium sized
> graphs, but can become problematic of your schema is too complex.
> 
> That was for a custom datamodel description language, though. A
> quick search on google suggests SQLFairy. The screenshots look quite
> good.
> 
> Links:
> http://www.graphviz.org/
> http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>

On 25-apr-05, at 18:26, Raymond Brigleb wrote:
>
> My question: is there a good way to generate a database diagram from 
> my MySQL dumps or directly from my database? Does anybody have a 
> favorite, or even a good, way of doing this sort of things?
Well, these tools are very scarce on our (Mac) side of the fence, but 
when I had to - I used DbVisualizer for that.

Basically it digged into my PostgreSQL database and drawn a graph with 
all the tables and fields linked by their constraints (simply by 
inflection). All of this from a live database via JDBC.
But it was not editable.

I believe if you stick with InnoDB and define your constraints properly 
(which always seems awkward to me due to the way they''re second-class 
citizens in MySQL) DbViz should be able to grok it as well.

-- 
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov

I like this software on OSX:

http://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/cocoa/

Let''s you import/export SQL and view/edit as ER diagrams.

- Isaac

On 26-apr-05, at 3:27, Isaac Reuben wrote:
> I like this software on OSX:
>
> http://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/cocoa/
>
> Let''s you import/export SQL and view/edit as ER diagrams.
>
Yes, the idea is nice but the last time I looked at it it was a pile of 
bugs, barely usable.
You also have XERD[1] (which would totally rock - only shouldn''t it 
have been abandoned).

Actually it''s quite pity that we Mac users have so many talented 
backend developers on the platform and, at the same time, so few
dev tools to make life easier (and modelers/UML graphers and the like 
are the most heavily missed, me thinks).


[1] http://www.joshuahawcroft.com/products/xerd/
-- 
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov