What software should I use for manually drawing schema diagrams?

mysql database-design diagram database-diagramming
Arkaaito picture Arkaaito · Jan 9, 2010 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

Our application has a fairly large, sprawling DB design, with 175 tables. Most tables are used by one or two primary features, and I'd like to create several little "mini-schemas" to describe the structure of different parts of the system to new hires (without showing them the gigantic total schema which is, frankly, so big as to be useless).

Since these are already-extant tables, I need a tool which will allow me to enter completely custom names for fields and specify connections myself (since some of our foreign keys don't follow the standard naming pattern).

What's the best cheap or free tool for this?

Bonus points if it allows custom colors to be selected for diagram elements (i.e., tables), since this would allow me to create a reassembled version of the schema for discussion of how the major systems interact.

Answer

zombat picture zombat · Jan 9, 2010

Well, it doesn't do custom colors, but MySQL Workbench is a free database modelling tool provided by MySQL.

You can even set it up to reverse engineer a full schema diagram just by having it connect to your database. You could take it from there and partition out what you needed into separate modelling diagrams.

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