Top all-time · #10636
Dian M Fay
Personal blog · di.nmfay.comprogrammingdatasystems
Dian M Fay's personal blog at di.nmfay.com covers programming, data and systems. Since 2018, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “After Massive”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this post on visualising databases, which shows ephemeral foreign-key graph slices from a single table's viewpoint. It is cited as an alternative to maintaining full ERDs.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- After Massive2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-20
What Hacker News says?
Full ERDs have always been more valuable to me in the making than in the having largely for that reason. But I've gotten a lot of mileage out of generating ephemeral slices of the foreign key graph from the "viewpoint" of a given table, as here: https://di.nmfay.com/exploring-databases-visually
Comment linking /exploring-databases-visually
on “Ask HN: Why aren't code diagram generating tools more common?”Submitted Exploring Databases Visually as a story · 146 points
HN discussionPostgres schema comments (COMMENT ON COLUMN mytable.mycolumn IS 'spline reticulation coefficient'). Otherwise, I've given up on ever maintaining data model documentation and generate ad hoc graphs from different perspectives in the foreign key network: https://di.nmfay.com/exploring-databases-visually
Comment linking /exploring-databases-visually
on “Ask HN: How do you document your Data Models?”Submitted The ultimate postgres vs. mysql blog post as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted The ultimate postgres vs. mysql blog post as a story · 4 points
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HN discussionSubmitted A Unified Multi-Tenant User Cache with PostgreSQL as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted MassiveJS version 7 went places as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted After Massive as a story · 1 points
HN discussion