Short answer: no. Even with a good auto-layout, nothing (up to now) beats a human made one because the latter will incorporate semantic which is not available to the modeling tool; for example, positioning, spacing and routing of relations will respect some sense of aesthetic and organization that are quite subjective. The only practical solution to untangle a complex model is to split it into sub-models and use aliases to reference tables in another sub-model.
Sébastien On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Wolfgang Keller <felip...@gmx.net> wrote: > > Concerning auto-layout, most if not all tools I have used up to now > > make a mess for anything that is not dead simple. > > If a data model can not be reasonably "untangled" by an auto-layout > algorithm (such as e.g. Graphviz) for display as a human-readable graph, > wouldn't that mean that this model is a mess from the modeling point of > view? > > In fact, shouldn't reasonably well-designed data models at least mostly > follow SER principles? In that case, they could be displayed > essentially as a tree. > > Could the "messy-ness" (or not) of the display of a data model (given > a standard alorithm such as Graphviz) be used as a criterion to judge > whether the model is actually well-structured? > > Sincerely, > > Wolfgang > > > -- > Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) > To make changes to your subscription: > http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general >