TALA VS dagre

This is a problem with the languages, not a fundamental flaw. Manipulating text has a much higher ceiling than drag and drop, in terms of speed and simplicity. Every programmer has their own ecosystem for manipulating text. I can grep, version control, diff, jump with Vim key bindings, etc.

The layout engines are very hard. We've been making https://terrastruct.com/tala for over 2 years now. At first it seemed dubious whether it was even possible to beat Graphviz, but we've been designing it to emulate how diagrams might look on a whiteboard drawn by humans. That's a very different heuristic than the theoretical hierarchical cross-minimizations that previous algorithms strive for, and it's yielded good results for a subset of diagrams.

https://github.com/terrastruct/TALA

(apologies for this path. trying to strike the balance of making it findable for those who search for it while hidden to those who just want free.)

It was unmaintained for a long time (maybe considered done implementing the algorithm it set out to), but recently a Google engineer has revived it: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

You are right, after a bit of searching found nice library: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre and couple of others. Maybe will try it out.

I am using ReactFlow with Dagre to create reasonably simple graph flows as the following example:

Hello,

I've been researching layered graph algorithms, but it appears that this market is mostly inactive at the moment.

Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) is considered outdated, with a codebase from 2015 that is no longer being updated, although they still accept some pull requests.

KLAY (https://github.com/kieler/klayjs) has been succeeded by ELK, and development stopped in 2016.

ELK (https://github.com/kieler/elkjs) is currently being developed by the KIELER Project, mostly by students and professors, written in Java. They are doing a great job, but the library is written in Java and then transpiled to JavaScript. They also rely on students for help with the development, which makes progress slow.

Do you happen to know of any new projects that are actively addressing this problem?

dagrejs has a section on "Recommended Reading" which lists which algorithms from which papers they implement.

https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre/wiki#recommended-reading

Terrastruct engineer here. The visualization will be open source though I can't say for sure yet whether it'll be with our layout algorithm or with https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre.

Another option is Dagre which is apparently now abandoned.