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Building an ERD for Existing Databases

Josephine Bush creates a diagram:

There are several tools out there to make your life easier by creating an ERD for your existing db. Everything works pretty well when you have a small number of tables with FKs mapped, but when the number gets bigger, the diagram naturally gets a lot messier. Here are some of the ones I tried.

Click through to see the full list. I haven’t found any that are particularly good at the job, especially not in the free or relatively inexpensive tiers. My problem is that the tools tend to get goofy when you update an existing model based on database changes: all that time you spent reorganizing entity locations so you don’t have a spaghetti mess of lines criss-crossing all of your entities gets wasted the next time you perform an update, because the tools tend to shuffle things around once again.