DBdraw - Automatic Layout of Relational Database Schemas

A wide number of practical applications would benefit from automatically generated graphical representations of database schemas, in which tables are represented by boxes, and table attributes correspond to distinct stripes inside each table. Links, connecting attributes of two different tables, represent referential constraints or join relationships, and may attach arbitrarily to the left- or to the righthand side of the stripes representing the attributes. To our knowledge no drawing technique is available to automatically produce diagrams in such a strongly constrained drawing convention. In this paper we describe DBDraw, a system that is able to automatically compute drawings of relational schemas, subject to the above constraints.