Mermaid is good for flowcharts, but we still lack reasonably good one for BPMN and enterprise diagrams. (BPMN.io is great but lacks its own lang)
I spend far too much time either:
- working in a visual designer that slows me down
Or
- fighting the layout engine of a markup language and image compiler with lots of directives to try to get the diagram to lay out anywhere close to reasonably.
The most valuable information, to me, is the table schema and the collection of relationships. Toward this end, I use a markdown table of three columns, (Field, Type, Attributes) and a code block with my own shorthand per below:
Table[field] -1:N- Table2[field2]
Detail[HeaderId] -N:1- Header[Id]
Diffs are incredibly readable.
If I need to make pictures for someone else, I iterate design in a markdown file and then once it's good I will spend the time required to make a picture based off the text.
I must admit, I start to question why the pictures are necessary.
1) you do a brainstorming. doing it the visual way is much slower than the markup way. personally done it dozens if not hundreds of times with seq.diagrams. actually started donating to this guy who created sequencediagram.org, he saved me hours
2) you need to communicate chunks of the design with non-technical personnel such as business analysts and folks who have no clue about normal forms, outer joins, relational or hybrid designs, etc. they understand much better with visual assistance, which is in essence - suggestopedic approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestopedia). and you know what - they never admit their lack of fundamental knowledge, which is even worse than not explaining the matter at all. bpmn and seq.diagrams work very well here, and of course - all 1910s flowchars should be forbidden.
3) when there's a large volume of intertwined entities. you just can't convince me that a graph is better represented as series of relational-algebra-alike texts, and not a planar image of it. try to imagine what the Northwind educational DB looks like as text ... and how you teach/explain to s.o. to walk it.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/northwind-databas...
I think I agree. My habit is to keep DDL in version control, one file per database object. If I'm interested in a table, column, or its relationships, I can grep for names, look at the files and see the datatypes, foreign keys, etc.
I can also by grepping find any stored procedure or function that references a table or column because the code for those is in version control also.
I've tried diagrams and while they are convenient at a fairly high level they can't really show you everything and become unweildy if they try. I've found them of such limited benefit that I just work with text/code. I might make a simple diagram if I have to present/talk about a change.
I want something that will use (text based, tree-sitter diffable, and git stored) architecture diagrams as its source of truth. Then compare those diagrams with actual code, and give us meaningful/useful divergence metrics. And from the source of truth, apply style transforms to display in different ways. D2 can do something like that last bit, with its different layout engines.
It feels like we already have the information available: we have (terraform) code that produces infrastructure, and (nodejs) code that produces applications. So how can take that structural information and turn it into something useful? I kind of like the idea of a ML model that gives you some standard views of your diagrams, then asks you which bits are useful, and which bits you want to hide/discard from the final output. Going back and forth with that a bit would produce a JSON file that tells the transform engine what to display. I don't know if an LLM can be prompted to do something like that, but a model-assisted workflow might be useful.
I also want to be able to compare before and after architectural decisions. Or compare the infrastructure and application patterns against industry best practices. Plus being able to automatically spit out updated, accurate diagrams for leadership would be great.