AbstractA wide number of practical applications would benefit from automatically generated graphical representations of database schemas, in which tables are represented by boxes, and table attributes correspond to distinct stripes inside each table. Links, connecting attributes of two different tables, represent referential constraints or join relationships, and may attach arbitrarily to the left‐ or to the right‐hand side of the stripes representing the attributes. To our knowledge no drawing technique is available to automatically produce diagrams in such a strongly constrained drawing convention. In this paper we provide a polynomial time algorithm for solving this problem, and test its efficiency and effectiveness against a large test suite. Also, we describe an implementation of a system that uses such an algorithm and we study the main methodological problems we faced in developing such a technology. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.