While MySQL Workbench’s community edition lacks a simple feature for creating Entity Relationship Diagrams, there is a workaround. Creating ER Diagram of a Database in MySQL Workbench, as documented by Tushar Soam, worked fine for me. The relationship connections do not point to the primary and foreign key fields, which is the only drawback I discovered. You can move things around, but you don’t have complete control over the lines.
Step-by-step
- Select Reverse Engineer from the Database menu.
- Select your connection and click Next.
- It will fetch the information it needs. Click Next.
- Select your database schema and click Next.
- It will retrieve the information it needs. Click Next until the Results Tab.
- Leave Import MySQL Table Objects and Place imported objects on a diagram selected and click Execute.
- Click Next once the retrieval for the selected Database has been completed successfully.
- Select the Database Tables you want to appear on the ER Diagram (in this case, I’m importing all of the DB’s tables), then click Execute>.
- Click Next once the Reverse Engineering Process has been successfully completed.
- Finish by clicking the Finish button.
