What software should I use for manually drawing schema diagrams?

Well, it doesn't do custom colors, but MySQL Workbench is a free database modelling tool provided by MySQL You can even set it up to reverse engineer a full schema diagram just by having it connect to your database. You could take it from there and partition out what you needed into separate modelling diagrams.

Well, it doesn't do custom colors, but MySQL Workbench is a free database modelling tool provided by MySQL. You can even set it up to reverse engineer a full schema diagram just by having it connect to your database. You could take it from there and partition out what you needed into separate modelling diagrams.

I wound up using this and doing my final markup in Paint.NET. Thanks for the tip! – Arkaaito Jan 21 '10 at 13:01.

For any kind of graph drawing I really find it hard to beat the utility of Graphviz; but it'd require you to learn a new (and I use "learn" loosely here) language called "dot". The language is incredibly simple, and there's plenty of templates around for using it to document schemas. On a side note, there's an excellent schema mapping tool which can infer connections based on column names that may get you pretty close to what you need, it's called SchemaSpy.

I enjoy the simplicity of WWW SQL Designer (Demo).

Check out this Open source Diagramming tool found here. Here is another called DBDesigner found here. Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

I use Visio. It has a reverse engineer capability that allows you to point to an ODBC source and it will pull in the tables, views and store procedures as drawing elements. If the contraints are present, it will auto connet the tables via their relationship.

Want to draw a sub-schema, just select the tables you need during the extraction and viola! It also has multiple pages inside the drawing so you can have a master page with everything and subsequent pages with subschema details embedded. You can also set line styles, fill styles and font styles too.

And If you are on MSDN, you already have it...

– Chip Uni Jan 9 '10 at 3:35 I think mysql is used in more places than just the LAMP stack than people realize. We hook a lot of windows and java clients to mysql that started out as internal development systems in government. – MikeJ Jan 11 '10 at 12:43.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.