Drawing the database schema

Posted by mooffie on October 18, 2007 at 12:33pm

Drupal 6 comes with a DB schema, which makes it possible now to programmatically draw a graph of the relationships among the tables.

Utilizing graphviz I played with the possibilities yesterday and here's a thumbnail of the result. Full-size versions can be found here.

The '.svg' and '.html' versions display a descriptive tooltip when you hover the mouse over fields.

Many tables are linked by "node.nid" or "user.uid" and in order to not clutter the display with too many "snakes" I colored "node.nid" links in green and "user.uid" ones in red. So wherever you see red or green lines don't bother following them with your eyes: you already know where they lead to.

Note that everything is done automatically. No tweaking is done by hand. The script uses drupal_get_schema() to learn about Drupal and a 'Makefile' is used to automate the generation of the various output files.

Comments

Fantastic! Been waiting for

Posted by gpk on October 18, 2007 at 1:49pm

Fantastic! Been waiting for this for years. (Well, months at least!)

Many thanks for making this.

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

...

Posted by mooffie on October 18, 2007 at 2:46pm

Thanks.

I should mention here the efforts made by webchick, add1sun, bjaspan, and others, to make all this possible (and easy (and fun! :-)).

OK, thanks to the whole team

Posted by gpk on October 18, 2007 at 4:29pm

OK, thanks to the whole team then ;-)

In fact this is so good that it really ought to be featured as a News item - finally everyone can understand the Drupal DB structure. A page in the handbook would simply not be enough to mark this giant leap for Drupaldom! Also found the Schema module. Arguably should be in core since it could be a vital admin tool (particularly at upgrade time ...!) Looks fantastic :-D

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

Awesome, and thanks!

Posted by mcurry on January 7, 2010 at 8:35pm

Thanks to all for this. I've been looking for something like this for a while. 22 Thumbs Up!

Oh no! The graphs aren't

Posted by gpk on November 9, 2007 at 7:59pm

Oh no! The graphs aren't there any more! I should have saved them locally!

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

...

Posted by mooffie on November 11, 2007 at 1:30pm

The files are there. Try again.

I know the server sometimes go offline. I have no control over this, sorry.

Phew!

Posted by gpk on November 14, 2009 at 9:22pm

:-)

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

Incorporate into handbook?

Posted by skor on May 6, 2008 at 4:01am

I'm not sure where would be the best place for it. Depth level, probably http://api.drupal.org but I'm not sure you can add pages there. They seem to be automatically created from the code.

Maybe somewhere at http://drupal.org/contributors-guide