High-quality ERD generator for PostgresQL under Linux?

Question

Background

MySQL Workbench can produce appealing and high-quality ERDs such as:

Research

What PostgreSQL ERD tools are available that meet the requirements? The following are unsuitable:

• dbVisualizer - Yellow squares.
• AquaFold - Yellow squares.
• SQL Developer - Coloured squares.
• Dia - Coloured squares.
• SQL Power Architect - Black and white squares.
• SchemaBank - Can't export to PNG; looks okay, nothing stellar.
• SchemaSpy - XML export makes it possible to write an XSL skin...
• Gliffy - Incompatible Flash version.
• Druid - No.

Requirements

Looking for an ERD tool:

• Visually stunning by default
• Can reverse-engineer a PostgreSQL (or JDBC-compliant) database
• Runs on Linux (or under WINE)
• Export high-resolution PNG (or SVG)
• Free or Open Source

Solution 1

This is a little bit dated question, but for completeness. What about PgModeler? According to their github repo it's under GPL3. Schema creation works well.

Solution 2

DbSchema is a Visual Designer for Relational & NoSQL Databases. It can be evaluated 15 days for free. After that a paid License must be purchased.

It can be used to generate a ERD for Postgresql as well as other databases.

Downloading installer

Installers are available to download for various platforms (Linux, Windows and MacOS).

Installing and running DbSchema on Linux

To install run following commands in your shell:

wget https://dbschema.com/download/DbSchema_unix_8_2_5.tar.gz
tar xf DbSchema_unix_8_2_5.tar.gz
cd DbSchema
chmod +x DbSchema_unix_8_x_x.sh

To run DbSchema:

./DbSchema_unix_8_x_x.sh

Note: Dependent on the downloaded version (e.g. 8_2_5) the commands above may change (i.e. replace 8_x_x with downloaded 8_2_5).

Solution 3

You may try DbVisualizer. In my opinion, DbVisualizer in references graphs has met my needs in generating ERD from existing database.

Comments

[Dave Jarvis]

Black and white squares. No drop-shadows, no rounded corners, no grouping (?), doesn't automatically prevent lines from being covered.

[jhexp]

Not yet. I'm looking into the latest version (0.4.0-beta). It seems that it supports pretty much everything that maps into postgres features or ddl. Binary for windows is 11mb gzipped and doesn't require installation.

[09Q71AO534]

is there any thing to install to make this work in windows. I am using pgadmin III is there a way to make some reverse engineering for getting the ERD diagrams

[Awi]

Latest version ( 0.6.0) does support reverse engineering and automated grouping tables by schema (one color for each schema).

[Fandi Susanto]

Just tried ver 0.6.1 today. Intuitive UI, great features considering it's free. But for complex diagram, the table columns often reorder itself, and it sometimes crash. You can use it if you don't mind those things.

[momeara]

It isn't free or open source

[puk]

I find this program to be unreliable. I can't even connect to the database even though it's installed locally

[Tobia]

I can confirm it works very well. It has good auto-routing functions and decent manual positioning support. It can export the image at arbitrary resolution (just set the zoom level) but if you need some minor graphical tweaks, such as coloring the boxes or adding captions, you can export as SVG and edit it in Inkscape. dbvis.com/images/features/screens/referencesGraph.png

[Victoria Stuart]

Appears to work well, but note: "DbSchema Ultimate Edition can be evaluated ( trial ) for 15 days after installation. After this period the application will switch to Free Edition with limited features and number of tables." [ dbschema.com/index.html | dbschema.com/editions.html ]

[Victoria Stuart]

pgModeler: very long install (Arch Linux AUR: pacaur; g++ ...), but like DbSchema also appeared to work OK, looks nice. Using DBeaver, however: nice interface; integrated ERD for multiple RDBMS including PostgreSQL ... [ dbeaver.jkiss.org ]

[cardamom]

The install really is a bit of a nightmare, this helped me to get pgmodeller to work in Debian 9 - github.com/pgmodeler/pgmodeler/issues/911

[hc_dev]

Seems DBSchema has no Free Edition anymore, but still 15-days trial. Suggested update to this post including links.