An Entity Relationship Diagram Example : Tips for Visio
It seems like a dying art, but I still strongly feel that Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) should be the starting point of all software development projects. Since they are for me anyway, I wanted a place to refer colleagues to for how to read these diagrams, and an Entity Relationship Diagram Example seemed like a great place to start. The Example: A Resource Management Application Consider that we’re writing a resource management application. The first step to creating an ERD is always to identify the nouns (entities). In this case let’s start with: Company Employee Project; and Technology Project (which are a specific type of Project that perhaps require special fields like “number of entities”) Here’s the Example Entity Relationship Diagram I’ll decipher piece by piece in this article (click to enlarge): (note that I’m now using singular names since my somewhat controversial decision to switch to naming entities in the singular ) To read the notati...