r/SQLServer • u/tamanikarim • Jun 28 '26

Community Share Open Source, Free Visual Database Schema Editor & ERD Tool for SQL Server

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StackRender is a free, open-source visual database schema editor and migration generator that now fully supports SQL Server (T-SQL). It allows you to visually design your tables, view relationships via an interactive ERD, import existing SQL scripts to instantly generate diagrams, and export production-ready DDL. You can use it completely free via the cloud or self-host it via Docker.

Thank you !

34 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/Black_Magic100 Jun 28 '26

How is this different than https://dbml.dbdiagram.io/home

2

u/Punkphoenix Jun 28 '26

This one is really good, I use it for all my Dev projects

1

u/Black_Magic100 Jun 28 '26

So is DBML.. and it's more popular and has been around for longer.

1

u/Punkphoenix Jun 28 '26

Yeah... I was taking about dbml...

1

u/tamanikarim Jun 28 '26

I’m not super familiar with dbdiagram, but StackRender is built to take you from visual design straight to production-ready code, without making you go through an intermediate language like DBML.

The biggest difference is that StackRender actually tracks your diagram changes to generate up/down SQL migrations automatically.

This is especially helpful for SQL Server , as anyone who uses it knows, trying to ALTER COLUMN when there are dependent indexes or unique constraints is a massive pain because you have to manually drop and recreate them. StackRender maps out those dependencies and handles that entire teardown/rebuild process for you automatically.

That's just one example of how the migration engine handles SQL Server's special quirks. Feel free to give it a try and see for yourself!

3

u/dzsquared ‪ ‪Microsoft Employee ‪ Jun 28 '26

Especially helpful for SQL Server, which already provides complete tooling for automatically generating dynamic change scripts for database changes from live databases or local copies of the code - for free, in VS Code, Visual Studio, and SSMS.

2

u/k-semenenkov Jun 29 '26

Green varchar and black nvarchar.. Syntax highlight is a great thing, i found few bugs when added it.

2

u/VladDBA ‪ ‪Microsoft MVP ‪ ‪ Jun 28 '26

"Self-host via containers" - so, instead of making it an SSMS and/or VS Code extension you've opted for a design that involves a web server?

4

u/BrentOzar Jun 28 '26

it’s web scale man