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Blogs » Archive for May 14th, 2007
Easy Database Schema Diagrams with DBVisualizer
I’ve never particularly liked databases.
Don’t get me wrong–I love using them. You know, filling them with data, watching my users fill them with data, deleting my users’ data* … but as long as it’s all from the safety of a server-side programming language–I’ve never been a big fan of interacting with them directly. All that SQL just gives me a headache.
Sure, we’ve come a long way from the SQL command line. We have web-based tools, like phpmyadmin and phpPgAdmin. And if you don’t fancy doing your heavy lifting over http, there are desktop tools like MySQL Query Browser and TOAD. And frameworks like Rails have migrations now, so we’ve got all the tools we need, right?
Well, if your brain works anything like mine does, then you’ll agree that sometimes it’s nice to have a “big picture” view of things–a diagram of your data goes a long way to helping understand how it fits together. If your application only consists of three or four tables, then you may already have one of these sketched out on a bit of paper. But none of the tools I mentioned above can provide us a picture of what …
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