It’s written in Java, so runs on just about any platform, and it’s dead easy to set up and use. But now there’s no need to.ĭBVisualizer is a slick database client that creates a schema diagram of your database. And if you’ve ever had to get your head around someone else’s schema in a short period of time, you’ll know what I’m talking about–sure, you could try and visualize this in your head, or sketch it out with pen and paper after poking around using a bunch of queries. Once your database schema grows beyond a handful of tables, this can become a significant issue. But none of the tools I mentioned above can provide us a picture of what our database actually looks like–which tables have foreign key constraints that point where. If your application only consists of three or four tables, then you may already have one of these sketched out on a bit of paper. Well, if your brain works anything like mine does, then you’ll agree that sometimes it’s nice to have a “big picture” view of things–a diagram of your data goes a long way to helping understand how it fits together. And frameworks like Rails have migrations now, so we’ve got all the tools we need, right? And if you don’t fancy doing your heavy lifting over http, there are desktop tools like MySQL Query Browser and TOAD. We have web-based tools, like phpmyadmin and phpPgAdmin. Sure, we’ve come a long way from the SQL command line. You know, filling them with data, watching my users fill them with data, deleting my users’ data* … but as long as it’s all from the safety of a server-side programming language–I’ve never been a big fan of interacting with them directly.
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