Thank You SchemaSpy

I love open source contributors. These people are the geeks who bypass reality shows, online gaming, and time with their families so that they can bring you something that will make your life better. They get nothing in return but a "atta boy/girl" and a pat on the back.

I am taking it upon myself to give thanks to a few of these open source contributors over the coming months. I am a typically just a taker when it comes to open source, but I would like to at least let the givers know, that I appreciate their hard work and commitment.

The first shout out goes to the kind contributors of SchemaSpy. SchemaSpy allows you to generate a web based ERD of an entire database, that is easily navigated by clicking on images throughout the web application. It's a simple jar file that can be downloaded and executed on any platform that has java installed. It supports a wide variety of databases and produces a ton of information in an easy to digest medium. The first thing you'll be presented is the table listing:

This view gives you all of the tables in the system, the number of rows in each table, and a number of other tables directly related via foreign key to this table.

When you click on one of the table names you are presented with the more specific table view:

The top level of information is like a describe of the table, but checking some of the boxes will allow you to see navigable parent and child rows for each of the columns.If you click on the images in the mini-ERD at the bottom of the page, it will navigate to the appropriate tables. Also note that you can expand the mini-ERD to 2 degrees of relationships.

These features in and of themselves are enough reason to automatically document your database with this tool, but another really applicable portion of the tool is the ability to identify anomalies within the database. Clicking on that tab provides you with this view:



Here you'll see a number of bad database smells very quickly. Unleash a DBA worth their weight on this page and you'll have some table alterations done very quickly.

I honestly see no reason to not use SchemaSpy on any project that we have. It is extremely easy to use, can be integrated into a build, and provides better reference documentation on the database than the vast majority of projects I've worked on. Well done SchemaSpy crew, and a sincere THANKS!