While an Entity Relationship Diagram editor is commonly regarded as a tool for database designers and architects used in the initial analyse and design phase, having a well documented system is a valuable asset for developers both for initial development and even more for the evolution/maintenance phase.


Database design

Database designers can use the ERD editor to document the information a system produces, build and maintain the relational database model. The database model can be versioned in any team provider (source control management system), comparison is done at the model level making it easier to see what was changed between versions and create incremental data definition files to update from one version to another.


Those are the basic steps for constructing an ERD:

    • Identify the entities:

The first step in making an ERD is to identify all of the entities the system will use. An entity is nothing more than a rectangle with a description of something that your system stores information about. This translates to a database table and could be a customer, an item, an invoice, a order, etc. Draw a rectangle for each entity you can think of on your page.


Analyze and Development

Business analyst and developers can use the relational database model to easily find the relations between different business objects as well as designing and documenting new features. Although in the end the database model need to be refined by setting all required entities properties, define indexes and assign each object to the appropriate database area, the design can start by simply identifying the new entities, add known properties relevant for the business and drawn relations between them. The 'logical' model can be used during the initial analyse phase to document the business view or simply exchange implementation ideas, then it can be translated to a relational database model by applying normalization and using database design best practices.s