Entity Relationship Diagraming with ERDLab
Written by Nikos Vaggalis   
Monday, 06 March 2023

ERDLab is a free and intuitive SQL Visualization Tool which helps in capturing your database design thoughts. Let's look into it.

To be exact, ERDLab falls into the SQL schema visualization tools category. It allows you not only to draw your database design visually but also in code. And it's not just drawing per se; you can interact with your schema and explore its relationships end to end and also collaborate on it in a team.

Reverse engineering wise, you can import your DDL and let ERDLab create the schema for you or the other way around, lets you export your DDL from your schema in order to create your database. It supports many SQL dialects such as Postgres, Mysql, Oracle and SQLite, with that list of supported dbms's
expanding looking to even do Amazon Redshift .

We've covered Team Collaboration, Reverse and Forward Engineering but there's more:

  • Multiple Tabs
  • Image/PDF Export
  • Documentation
  • DB Conversion
  • Templates
  • Version Controls
  • One Click Sharing
  • Notes
  • Comments
  • Advanced View Modes
  • Zoom in/out
  • Mini-Map
  • Table & Line Colors
  • Schema Search
  • Autolayout
  • Object Color Coding

Privacy wise, your data stays in your browser for the session duration but also gets encrypted and saved to the server. The makers are open to changing this but based on their research and current feedback, users value sharing features too much to give up on this.

Business model wise, how are the makers looking to monetize the experience? The answer was :

We started this without any intention to monetize but we have been working on real-time collaboration and we want to see if there is enough demand from teams and enterprises to cover our costs in the long run. For individuals, we will keep it free.

Free users will always have access to current sharing features.

1) Live link open for everyone
2) Invite team members with read and read+write permissions
3) Embedding (coming soon).

Still a side project and may always stay that way if not enough demand from enterprise teams,

As a fresh project it is constantly evolving and asking for feedback from the community to incorporate changes and additions in later versions. For instance, they've accepted my request to add Optionality to the FKs.

There's an open access playground where you can start drawing your schema without having to create an account, but in order to activate the collaboration and sharing functionalities you have to create an account, free of course too.

Surely a valuable addition to my SQL toolset.

 

More Information

ERDLab

Designer playground

 

Related Articles

SQL Snippets - Crowdsourcing SQL Queries

BlocklySQL - Visual SQL Programming

 

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Banner


Open Source Key To Expansion of IoT & Edge
13/03/2024

According to the 2023 Eclipse IoT & Edge Commercial Adoption Survey Report, last year saw a surge of IoT adoption among commercial organizations across a wide range of industries. Open source [ ... ]



Pi Day - The Great Unanswered Questions
14/03/2024

It's Pi day again, again, again... Even after so many, I still have things to say about this most intriguing number. The most important things about Pi is that it is irrational and one of the few tran [ ... ]


More News

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info