database-visualizer

Dependencies

Make sure you have graphviz, libtool installed.

OS X

To do that you can use homebrew:

brew install graphviz libtool

Ubuntu

sudo apt install graphviz libtool openjdk-8-jre-headless

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You will need JRE 8 installed as well.

Usage

You can use this to generate a visual representation of your local database.

It has the following assumptions:

• your database is PostgreSQL
• you have a postgres user with no password set there
• the database runs on port 5432 at localhost
• it has a default schema called public

If you want to modify any of the above setting, you can change visualize.sh file.

GUI

To generate a GUI for your database you can use:

./visualize.sh DATABASE_NAME [OUTPUT_DIRECTORY]

Keep in mind that OUTPUT_DIRECTORY is optional and its default is the same as DATABASE_NAME .

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There are some convenient scripts predefined for already existing projects which have database name and output directory provided.

Results

The entry point to generated results is OUTPUT_DIRECTORY/index.html. It looks as follows:

Tables

which lists all of the tables involved in relationships.

Constraints

which includes:

• foreign keys
• child/parent tables
• deletion rules

Relationships

which represents relations themselves (with optional columns to see).

Utility tables

Which are basically all tables that are not connected with antyhing else. They are not involved in the relations above.

CSV

Lucidchart has an awesome feature of importing CSV generated schemas and generating tables that are ready to be placed on the canvas.

To get an appropriate CSV file you can execute

./generate_csv_schema.sh DATABASE_NAME [OUTPUT_FILE]

Prepare a document

1. Create a new Lucidchart document
2. Press more shapes button in the bottom left corner
3. Tick Entity Relationship checkbox
4. Click Save
5. In the left pane in Entity Relationship section select import.
6. Click Choose file button and point to the generated CSV file.
7. Click OK

Drawing a schema

1. Once imported, all tables should be visible in left pane under PROJECT_NAME section
2. You can drag and drop them to a canvas
3. After you have all tables in your documents, you can organize them as you wish

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Results

The result is a .csv file that can be imported and used in Lucidchart directly.

After running a script you will find it as:

./OUTPUT_FILE.csv

Contribution

Feel free to add new scripts for any other project you need.