3 posts tagged with "visualization"

We recently shipped a new feature in Atlas that enables developers to quickly create ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) visualizations of their database schemas. Today, I want to show how this feature can be used in tandem with one of Atlas's core capabilities - "Schema Loaders" - to produce visualizations of GORM models.

But first, let's introduce the different characters in this story:

• Atlas - an open-source tool for managing database schemas.
• GORM - one of the most popular ORMs for Go.
• ERD - a diagram that shows the relationships between entities in a database. (we'll see an example in a minute)
• Schema Loaders - a feature in Atlas that allows users to load their database schemas from different sources.

In this blog post, we will create a toy GORM application, and show how you can use Atlas to visualize the database schema that GORM generates for you.

Having a visual representation of your data model can be helpful as it allows for easier comprehension of complex data structures, and enables developers to better understand and collaborate on the data model of the application they are building.

Entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) are a common way to visualize data models, by showing how data is stored in the database. ERDs are graphical representations of the entities, their attributes, and the way these entities are related to each other.

Today we are happy to announce the release of DjangoViz, a new tool for automatically creating ERDs from Django data models.

Atlas is most commonly used for managing and applying schema changes to databases, but it can also be used for something else: exploring and understanding database schemas.

With inspection, Atlas connects to your database, analyzes its structure from the metadata tables, and creates a graph data structure that maps all the entities and relations within the database. Atlas can then take this graph and represent it in various formats for users to consume. In this post, I will present two such forms of representation: Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and JSON documents.