ER diagram software

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Brandon Metcalf wrote:

I've been able to find a couple of packages, but wondering if there is
a good system out there what will create an ER diagram of an existing
PostgreSQL DB. Open source would be nice.

I use dbwrench.com. It's not opensource, but is inexpensive and has
trial period.

Thanks.

Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83

Brandon Metcalf, 22.07.2008 12:36:

I've been able to find a couple of packages, but wondering if there is
a good system out there what will create an ER diagram of an existing
PostgreSQL DB. Open source would be nice.

Thanks.

Try Power*Architect, so far the best open source solution I have seen.

http://www.sqlpower.ca/page/architect

Thomas

I have done some research recently and found on acceptable:

- DBdesigner4, which is depreceated and replaced by MySQL workbench. Is
OSS, but no linux version yet. Also has clunky pgsql support

- Aqua data studio (www.aquafold.com). It's java app which I am using for
some time already. Originally it had dual license, free for
non-commercial use, but after looking at the site they changed it to
more restrictive licensing. ER diagrams are acceptable quallity (but far
from perfect).

Additionally its not cheap anymore :-(

Regards,
Bohdan

b == bmetcalf@nortel.com writes:

b> I've been able to find a couple of packages, but wondering if there is
b> a good system out there what will create an ER diagram of an existing
b> PostgreSQL DB. Open source would be nice.

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

--
Brandon

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:36:39 -0500 (CDT)
"Brandon Metcalf" <bmetcalf@nortel.com> wrote:

I've been able to find a couple of packages, but wondering if there
is a good system out there what will create an ER diagram of an
existing PostgreSQL DB. Open source would be nice.

For reverse engineering models I've liked dbVisualizer (not OS,
relatively cheap)

http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/

Josh

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:36 AM, Brandon Metcalf <bmetcalf@nortel.com> wrote:

I've been able to find a couple of packages, but wondering if there is
a good system out there what will create an ER diagram of an existing
PostgreSQL DB. Open source would be nice.

PostgreSQL Autodoc: http://www.rbt.ca/autodoc/

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>