: Re: How should I document a database schema? I am going to be writing some user-facing documentation for a database that visitors can query. That is, the people writing queries are not the ones

@Steve161

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If this is user-facing documentation, then make up a data dictionary that describes the tables and columns with supplementary blurbs about the meaning of the data (e.g. the meanings of specific values in a column). This can be a straightforward HTML document with the supplementary descriptions as text.

If you need to produce E/R diagrams then Visio professional (version 2010 and earlier) has a passably good database diagramming feature and should be fairly widely available. There are other tools that will do this as well. Unfortunately Visio's SVG output is pretty crap and I'm not aware of any modelling tool that will produce good SVG diagrams.

Dia is an open-source diagramming tool and has a UML modeller which could be co-opted to produce usable E-R diagrams that will render in SVG. If you can live with bitmap illustrations of the data model then you can get away with taking screenshots from Visio. In this case, split the model into subsystems and make illustrations of the parts.

For user documentation this will be far more useful than any model-based approach.

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