ER diagram examples, drawn from real databases
Famous sample schemas, rendered by the live converter straight from their official files — the same paste-render-export path your own schema takes. Open one, then paste yours over it.
Pick a schema
Chinook
The digital media store sample — artists, albums, tracks, playlists and invoices — rendered straight from the official schema file.
11 tables · 11 relationshipsNorthwind
Microsoft's classic trading-company sample — customers, orders, products and shippers — rendered from the T-SQL install script, GO batches and all.
13 tables · 13 relationshipsPagila
The PostgreSQL port of the DVD-rental classic: films, actors, inventory, rentals and payments, rendered from the official schema dump.
16 tables · 19 relationshipsAdventureWorks
Microsoft's flagship OLTP sample — a bicycle manufacturer's people, products, sales, purchasing and HR — rendered from the official install script.
46 tables · 32 relationshipsFor scale: GitLab's whole database
GitLab publishes its entire database structure as a 63,000-line structure.sql — 1,472 tables wired together by 1,918 foreign keys. That file is part of this tool's regression test suite, not a marketing claim. Paste it into the converter and watch it render.
Why examples, drawn live
- Honest output — what you see is exactly what your own paste produces: same parser, same layout, same exports
- Real dialects — SQLite brackets, T-SQL GO batches, PostgreSQL partitions and sequences, exactly as the official files declare them
- Permissively licensed — every schema shown ships under MIT or the PostgreSQL Licence, credited on its page
- Open one, paste yours — the fastest way to evaluate a converter is against a schema you already understand
Questions, answered
Where do these example schemas come from?
From the official repositories of well-known sample databases — Microsoft's SQL Server samples, the Chinook project, the Pagila port — each released under a permissive license (MIT or the PostgreSQL Licence) and credited on its page.
Are these diagrams hand-drawn?
No. Every example page is the live converter pre-filled with the official schema file, rendered the same way your own paste would be. If the diagram looks right, that's the parser, not an illustrator.
My schema is bigger than these — can it handle it?
Free renders up to 50 tables per diagram, Pro up to 500. For scale: GitLab publishes its entire database as a 63,000-line structure.sql — 1,472 tables and 1,918 foreign keys — and that file is part of our regression test suite.
Converters & comparisons
- SQL to ER Diagram — paste any dialect
- SQL to Mermaid — text blocks for READMEs
- dbdiagram.io alternative — no DBML to learn
- DrawSQL alternative — 50 tables free, nothing public