Re: ER diagram software

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Brandon Metcalf wrote:

> Thanks for all that have responded so far. I'm looking at
> Power*Architect which looks very cool and is Open Source.

I looked in vain at this very question recently. Power*Architect was nice,
but didn't seem to be able to display updates to the diagram after it was
initially sucked out of Postgres. It can sorta-kinda diff things, but
that's it. Also, I thought it's ER Diagram quality was... not so hot.

Also nice was DbVisualizer. (http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis/) In many
ways it seemed better than Power*Architect, but when it came time to suck
up changes from the database since the ER diagram was created, the only
way DbVisualizer can do it is by automatically (and randomly) laying out
the entire schema again.

<rant>
Surely there is somebody out there other than me who just wants to display
an ER diagram of a database, and not control the database schema through
that same tool? All the tools I've found seem to do, at best, an
acceptable job of laying out something that already exists, and let you
hand-tweak it to be better.... but if you want to pick up changes you've
made to the database via some out-of-band scripts, well, sux 2 b u.
</rant>