[hobs]

The truth is that if you are modeling a relationship set of 1000 tables you probably cant usefully show that to someone - you can produce an image but nobody can likely use it.

Instead, consider breaking things down to functional areas and then modeling those - just like how most city thinking is "well get on this main road and then this secondary road will get me to XYZ"

[dangardan]

That's a good point, but to extend my situation, it's a client database I've been asked to transform. The map is indeed difficult to grok all in one, but using different views that come out of the box in yEd, along with some basic rules such as "make all nodes with the word 'cust' yellow", it's been surprisingly effective at exploring the schema.