What tools are available to document a legacy database schema (PDF, DOC, HTML, RTF)

After some research and looking at the options available I've decided to use schema spy which does pretty much want I wanted.

It produced the results in a reasonable format, but also provided an XML dump of the meta data which I was able to use to write an XSLT transformation to match what I wanted in the first place.

Tip came from answer to question 1869.


You can use MySQL Workbench or his ancestor DBdesigner 4 (open source):

  1. Capture all the database diagram graphically with the "reverse engineering" tool.
  2. Adjust and comment anything you need.
  3. Use the HTML report plugin included in the plugins menu.

Done!


DeZign for Databases can do that for you. Auto-layout is done after the import of your database. You can eventually rearrange the objects in the diagram and then generate a html (or pdf) report from your database including a clickable diagram. DeZign for Databases