Organizing with Groups & Notes

Why organize?

Schemas with 20+ tables can get visually overwhelming. Groups and notes help you create logical sections, document design decisions, and make the diagram readable for both developers and stakeholders.

Step 1: Create a group on the canvas

In the toolbar, click the Layers icon (Group). Your cursor changes to "add group" mode. Click and drag on the canvas to draw a rectangle — this becomes your group.

Give the group a name like "Auth & Users", "Orders & Payments", or "Content Management". The group appears as a labeled container on the canvas.

Step 2: Add tables to a group

Drag tables into the group area. When a table is inside a group, it's visually associated with that group. You can also:

• Drag tables out of a group to remove them
• Move the group — all tables inside it move together
• Resize the group by dragging its edges

Step 3: Customize group colors and labels

Click on a group to select it and open its properties. You can:

• Change the color — choose from a palette of colors to visually distinguish different logical areas of your schema
• Rename the group — double-click the group header to rename it
• Adjust the size — drag the edges to resize
• Delete the group — removes the container but keeps the tables in place

Color-coding makes it easy to scan a large diagram at a glance. For example, use blue for user-related tables, green for product/inventory, amber for financial/payments, and purple for system/audit tables.

Step 4: Add notes to the canvas

In the toolbar, click the Square icon (Note). Click anywhere on the canvas to place a note. Type your content — notes support plain text and are great for:

• Design decisions: "We chose to denormalize order totals for query performance"
• TODOs: "Need to add soft delete support to this table"
• Constraints: "This table should never exceed 10M rows — add partitioning"
• Context: "This table maps to the external Stripe API webhook payload"

Notes can be positioned anywhere on the canvas and moved freely. They're saved with the diagram and visible to all collaborators.

Step 5: Use multiple diagrams for different views

For very large schemas, you can create multiple diagrams within the same data model. Each diagram shows a different subset or arrangement of your tables:

• Full schema — all tables, for documentation
• User module — only auth-related tables
• API surface — tables that map to API endpoints
• Migration focus — tables you're currently working on

Click the "+" tab at the top to create a new diagram. Each diagram has its own canvas with independent table positions, groups, and notes. The underlying schema is shared — if you add a column in one diagram, it appears in all diagrams that show that table.

You can switch between diagrams using the tabs at the top of the editor. This is especially useful during team discussions — switch to a focused view to talk about a specific module without the noise of the full schema.