3 ms·
This looks great! However, a pet peeve of mine that I always share with my students is that ER diagrams do not have foreign keys. ER diagrams represent relation
by michaelmior 3y ago
This looks great! However, a pet peeve of mine that I always share with my students is that ER diagrams do not have foreign keys. ER diagrams represent relationships with a diamond connected by lines to the related entities. It looks like what this is producing is not really an ER diagram.
- wongarsu 3y agoThe big diamonds are specifically the Chen notation of ER diagrams. Which is popular in academia because that's how Professor Chen first described ER models, but seems pretty unpopular everywhere else because it's not that readable, especially as models get larger. Most people who have to actually use ER diagrams seem to use some variation of the UML notation. And even though it doesn't seem to have a name, OPs version is a pretty straightforward (and imho more intuitive) extension of the UML notation (forbidding N-N relationships and adding the relationship name as a foreign key to the table instead of writing it on the arrow). It's also hardly the first time I've seen it, we just need someone to publish a book that gives it a catchy name. If we want people to actually use ER diagrams, treating the original version from 50 years ago as the only valid way to write them doesn't seem useful. Both science and engineering are about iterative improvement after all.
- michaelmior 3y agoI'm not saying the diagrams the OP is using aren't useful, but I would argue that they are not ER diagrams.