You'll see the words: notation, indicators, and symbols used interchangeably.
This tutorial will help you understand what entities and their attributes are in entity relationship diagrams, the various symbols in crow's foot notation that you can use to define the relationship between entities, and how to read and understand diagrams.Īt the end of the tutorial, you should be able to understand and read diagrams, and create your own entity relationship diagrams making use of crow's foot notation to define your entity relationships.
In order to understand the relationship between entities in an ERD, we use specific symbols and notations.Īlthough there are various notations for understanding ERDs, we'll focus on Crow's Foot Notation which is one of the most commonly used when creating/designing ERDs. This lets us create graphical representations of the entities that make up systems such as a database (you will understand this better with the examples in this tutorial). In software development, ERDs are mostly used in database design. Entity relationship diagrams (ERD) help us understand the connection between various 'entities' that make up a system.
