[tejtm]

I used SchemaSpy to great effect for many years, till someone decided it was abandoned and took it over. When I tried again it had become shockingly bloated presumably in the name of modernity. I just wrote a one pager for the SQL dialect I was in and moved on. I get that it is java, and bloating is considered normal but as the original author proved, it does not have to be that way all the time.

[sbuttgereit]

This could well be the case, but to be honest I'm not too concerned by that. So in short, it may not be a well engineered product, but it seems to do its job well enough which is all I really care about as a user.

My usage pattern is to run it on a workstation (usually my personal workstation or laptop) and take the result and put it somewhere useful. It's not a perpetually running process or something I'd run on, say, a production machine where any bloat could produce meaningfully negative results. Those results are also not something I'm too worried about for things like bloated web pages or so... at least insofar as the audience for that result is fairly limited and the user experience isn't something I see as hurting usability. Any extra time it takes doing its job because of any inefficiency doesn't really impact me either; once I'm at a point I can set it running on a database, I haven't found it to be terribly long running, I don't run it often, and usually I can just do other stuff while it's running (a few minutes or so).

I haven't found anything open source that produces as good a result and its commercial competitors aren't any better in any sufficiently meaningful way... unless you want to start talking about database documentation being integrated into larger, consolidated requirements/documentation tools.

If anything I'm pleased that someone did pick up the maintenance and that new database features and the like have some hope of being supported... and without maintenance the result -would- eventually come to suffer as things in the database world moved on.