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Diagrams as Code (medium.com)

submitted 6 months ago by nydas@lemmy.world to c/data_engineering@programming.dev

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How often do you build and edit Entity Relationship Diagrams? If the answer is ‘more often than I’d like’, and you’re fed up with tweaking your diagrams, take <5 minutes to read my latest article on building your diagrams with code. Track their changes in GitHub, have them build as part of your CI/CD pipeline, and even drop them into your dbt docs if you like.

This is a ‘friends and family’ link, so it’ll bypass the usual Medium paywall.

I’m not affiliated to the tool I’ve chosen in any way. Just like how it works.

Let me know yours thoughts!

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[–] Corbin@programming.dev 4 points 6 months ago (5 children)

This is a good first step. The next step is to think about dependencies in the build process; to what degree can the diagram be used to implement the rest of the system?

One difficulty with using Mermaid this way is a loss of machine-readable formal information. Mermaid is focused on markup and cosmetics, which is great for presentation, but not great for machine-readability. I don't know if there are any better alternatives, though; it's not common for presentation formats to have machine-readable structures.

[–] nydas@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Great point. We use this for our solution design docs, and to display the final star schema in our dbt models that we then embed within our dbt docs. Given we use dbt for our warehouse, we don’t need to worry about the create table statements.

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