Show HN: Dbdot – Golang tool to help generate Postgres schema diagrams

Re:Show HN: Dbdot – Golang tool to help generate Postgres sc... by maweki on Sunday April 07, 2019 @04:03AM (#19595475)

The diagrams in that way are problematic. When you model them as digraphs and use this layout and order them from too to bottom you get all the tables at the top that represent n:m relationships and at the bottom (at different levels) your main/independent entities.

At least bottom to top would pack the independent ones to the top and those that represent many-to-many relationships at the bottom.

From my work with Oracle Datamodeler know that even at a dozen tables manual layout beats an algorithm any time. And the oracle algithms are more sophisticated/less general than dot.

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Re:Show HN: Dbdot – Golang tool to help generate Postgres sc... by akarki15 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @12:00PM (#19597607)

That's a valid concern. My inspiration for writing this tool was to create schema diagrams for select tables (hence the -whitelist flag in the tool) rather than _all_ the tables. Think design review, presentation etc instead of exploring a new db. Having some way to dictate what table would be at the top vs. bottom would be nice.

My only fear with that is dbdot becomes bloated with flags and features. If customization of dot can be achieved by piping dbdot output to some other tool, I will explore that path.

Thank you for your feedback :)

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Re:Show HN: Dbdot – Golang tool to help generate Postgres sc... by stubish on Sunday April 07, 2019 @05:42AM (#19595810)

Anyone know of any tools that let you manually layout the elements in a dotfile such as generated by dbdot or similar tools?

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Re:Show HN: Dbdot – Golang tool to help generate Postgres sc... by mistrial9 on Sunday April 07, 2019 @10:21AM (#19596912)

.. not a giant fan of AI but, this sounds like exactly the sort of thing an AI could be taught to do ..

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