Preparing Quick DB Diagrams — dbdiagrams.io

I get excited by small little online tools which makes a developer’s life easy.

jsoneditoronline, balsamiq, csv to json converters, parquet file viewers etc are some of those tools which I had got used to at some point of time.

This post is to talk about another tool which helps us to document data models quickly. Let us quickly see how this works with the help of a small example.

Let us say, we want to represent the above data model with an Entity Relation Diagram. We can make use of this tool dbdiagrams.io to do that. The below is the source for generating the diagram

Table students  {
  student_id int [pk]
  student_name string
}
Table subjects  {
  subject_id int [pk]
  subject_name string 
}
Table results {
  student_id int
  subject_id int
  marks int 
}
Ref:"results"."student_id" > "students"."student_id"
Ref:"results"."subject_id" > "subjects"."subject_id"

The above is the ERD generated.

The best part about this tool is that, when we first open it, we have a sample ERD there which is editable and we do not have to really learn the syntax for generating an ERD. We can always edit the example and make a fresh diagram according to our requirement! And yes, that makes it really quick and easy to use. No browsing & no copying and pasting from other sites are required!

There are more features in this tool. It might be worth exploring.