mysqldatabasedocumentation-generationdata-dictionary

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


I need to document a legacy database schema for a new employee and as there's no design document I'd like to generate one from the existing schema. As the tables are MyISAM the foreign key relationships won't produce a nice graph. I'm interested in producing a document showing the important tables, their columns, types and remarks.

Are there any tools available to produce a nice document (PDF, DOC, HTML or RTF say) from the database schemas meta data? Or am I better writing a utility to export this myself (I was thinking dump it to XML and then transform it using XSLT)? The schema is running on MySQL 5.


Solution

  • 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.