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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

Every time this topic comes up, people discuss tools they use which all seem to be nothing more than a graphical version of psql. As in, they let you see a list of tables, then see the columns of that table, run queries, etc. But none of that is actually making anything better or easier, its just a different client with the same features.

Does anyone know of a tool that has a good visual DB design interface? That is what I am missing (not just when I work with postgresql, but period). I want to be able to easily and visually see the relationships between tables, not just the tables themselves, or one table with a list of its relationships. Something like this: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/ but not web based and actually supporting all of postgresql?

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There's a bit of a killer tool that's relatively well known in geospatial data circles (and has been kicking about for a few decades) called FME from Safe Software [1] that I've never seen referenced in the non spatial database circles.

It's got some of the best table visualisation and table/tool/translation/QC intergration visual design tools I've seen.

It's essentially built with the goal of starting with multiple table sources in various ASCII / <some>SQLDB format and displaying all tables, building filter pipes to merge and translate data on the fly and produce single or multiple coherent databases and table sets (or even more ascii tables) as output.

It has it's quirks but it's a solid bit of kit ( I used it some years back to read in and unify data from several million leases (geospatial boundaries and related metadata) from multiple sources (Australian, Canadian, South African, etc. land departments) - from whoa to go was about four days, once running it chewed through the data on par with normal copy speeds (eg: it imported cleaned & filtered data in a time ballpark to just copying the data from A->B).

I'm not affiliated, but on the basis of that job, yeah, I'll spruik it.

[1] http://www.safe.com/

[2] http://www.safe.com/fme/fme-technology/fme-desktop/overview/

( See desktop demo video from overview section )

Not sure about other db's, but there are several pages on the PG wiki about gui tools:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GUI_Database_Design_Tools

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreSQ...

As much as it pains me to say this, that's one of the things that MS Access did fairly well. It might actually be possible to do that through ODBC with it actually.

We've used MySQL Workbench to visually design our Postgres schema.

We then export it into MySQL database, generate a migration based on that, and then apply the migration to a Postgres database. Before we used migrations, we instead had a shell script with a series of sed commands to map the MySQL SQL output to SQL that will work in Postgres.

So, there are options, but I'd very much like a visual DB designer for Postgres as well.

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