Monday, October 26, 2009

Entity relation diagrams (ERD)

These are diagrams which show database tables, the fields in each table and the relationships between tables. I've been looking on and off for a simple and free program which will display erds, and which will preferably extract the information needed automatically from a database.

Today I found such a program: IBUtils. Loading a database and displaying its structure is a bit awkward initially, but once the data is on screen, it's plain sailing.

Here is the erd for the database which I partially described the other day:

I have yet to determine whether red lines are different from green lines.

No comments: