The current 10.2 release of ArcGIS Diagrammer does not work with ArcGIS Desktop 10.3 and will be the final Diagrammer release according to the link here.
ArcGIS Diagrmmer functionality is needed for ArcGIS Desktop 10.3.
Add a utility or tool to create, edit and analyze the geodatabase schema. The ArcGIS Diagrammer available from ArcScripts is an example of such a utility. Schema is presented as editable graphics in an environment familiar to users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Essentially ArcGIS diagrammer is a visual editor for ESRI’s Xml Workspace Document which are created by ArcCatalog, the management application in the ArcGIS Desktop product suite.
I agree that this is badly needed. In addition, the tool needs to also provide the ability to reapply schema to existing geodatabases. For instance, if I delete composite relationships and geometric networks in order to load data with the Simple Data Loader, I should be able to then reapply those relationships and networks after the data load.
Such an integrated tool will go a long way to make designing, documenting, and diagramming (the three Ds) in ArcGIS a lot smoother instead using other add-ins or third party tools which doesn't always work well.
I've been using ArcGIS Diagrammer to build a fairly complex electric distribution and transmission model, and one thing I just found that it could do that would have saved me a couple of days of sleuthing is detecting incompatible relationship classes. I had accidentally created 2 feature classes duplicated composite relationships, and no good way to tell which one was faulty. My only recourse was to import into arccatalog repeatedly until I narrowed it down to a small enough set to analyze. This would be a good thing to catch on the Validate command.
I would like to see a UML Profile of the Geodatabase, since Diagrammer (while quite nice) is an unsupported Esri research project. And GDB XRay has you use Excel for round-trip geodatabase design? There must be a better way.
With a UML Profile of the Geodatabase, one could use a tool like Enterprise Architect to build, document, and trace back items to requirements and use cases. Would be quite helpful in building Very Large Geodatabases and be able to communicate those designs to non-GIS folks within the Enterprise:
Considering the XML Schema of the Geodatabase, so far as I know, can exhaustively represent everything in a Geodatabase; and since the importing and exporting of XML Workspace Documents already exists in ArcCatalog, it seems possible in principle to generate a UML Profile and leave it to others (like Sparx Systems) to develop design tools. Diagrammer and GDB Xray are nice gestures, but don't offer a complete and holistic geodatabase design solution for modern enterprise systems.
I echo the thoughts presented by 'dananrg' below (or above). ESRI has a plethora of scripts and utilities written by there own internal staff and users for the management of SDE and the Geodatabase particularly for SDE and Schema management. These thoughts have been posted to the Geodatabase BLOG as well. The XML schema for the geodatabase exists which is good (except large!). But it does exhaustively itemize the structure of a geodatabase and since it is XML can be extended. So - tools to analyze the XML as a representation of the schema and then allow it to be 'applied' back against the schema would be helpful. I've posted a request for a schema differences tool - this is done for replica's right now. Same thing applies for here. There are other tools (Like Sparx Enterprise Architect) that could be used to handle the diagramming side of things but the management and assessment of the schema added by EsRi would be powerful.
