Postico VS schemaspy

Postico - Price: $35.99 (one-time purchase) PostgreSQL client for Mac that features a user-friendly interface and powerful features.

If you prefer a GUI (Graphical User Interface), Postico has a simple free version that let's you explore tables and run SQL queries.

Postico is macOS PostgreSQL client for reading data, doing basic manual data entry and editing your database structure.

You might want to use a different elephant logo... the branding implies that it is an official part of the project.

E.g. Postico uses an elephant but not the _same_ elephant - https://eggerapps.at/postico/

TablePlus for multiple databases or Postico just for Postgres

Postico: A Modern PostgreSQL Client for the Mac\ (98 comments)

There are annoying show-stopper bugs that the developer refuses to fix, like this one for not being able to set options for null/empty values when importing data from csv ( https://github.com/jakob/Postico/issues/406). Or issues importing CSVs exported by Postico itself, that seems like a pretty basic requirement.

I love the diagram maker, and this looks like it has fewer dependencies than https://schemaspy.org/ (which is still FANTASTIC for larger databases).

You might try https://schemaspy.org/ - it generates a website with ER diagrams that only go one or two relationships out, but they have clickable table names to get to the next diagram

SchemaSpy is a standalone application that connects to the database, scans its tables and schemas, and generated nicely composed HTML documentation. You can check out an example sample by this link but I'm showing you just one screenshot to clarify my point.

Over the course of my career I've been pretty database centric in the work that I do. The databases I deal with will typically be highly normalized with table counts from around 300 on the low end and just over 1000 on the higher end. My experience is that they are helpful, though they can sometimes be a little overrated. I don't think I'd call them essential. Depending on the database vendor and the how the database was developed, if certain documentation was built into the database schema, some diagramming tools can pull this into the right places and so surface that documentation in way that can be more fluidly examined (think PostgreSQL's COMMENT ON functionality).

As others have pointed out, I usually don't use them to try to get the big picture: you're right in it is a morass of over-lapping lines and tiny boxes. At the whole database view, the best you can hope for is finding certain "information clusters", places where many references cluster, that can get you to the major ideas implemented by the application; this is helpful sometimes when coming to an application you haven't encountered before. The more useful aspect is when you've already got a central table and you're trying to understand the closest relationships to that table: maybe directly related or one away. There are database diagramming tools that will allow you to pick a relation and then limit the diagram to those one away, two away sets of relationships. Of course manually just telling the tool to diagram only a particular subject area of the database at a time reduces the sense of noise in these diagrams and typically you're only really trying to understand the data structure of such a subset of the database at any one time anyway.

The open source diagramming tool I use is called SchemaSpy (https://schemaspy.org/). Its not a database design GUI or anything like that. It inspects an existing database and creates documentation based on what it finds. It does that "pick a relation and show me relationships a couple degrees of separation" thing.

In a similar vein there is Schemaspy[1]. It generates a static documentation website for your DB, which also uses GraphViz to build ER diagrams.

[1] https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy