Entity Relationship Diagram
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Same as ERD — a visual picture of your database tables and how they connect. Lines between boxes show relationships. Crow-foot symbols show if it is one-to-one or one-to-many. It is the database equivalent of a UI wireframe.
Real Talk
An Entity Relationship Diagram is a structural diagram for database design. Entities represent tables, attributes represent columns, and relationships with cardinality notation represent foreign key connections. ERDs exist as both conceptual (business entities) and physical (actual tables/columns) variants.
When You'll Hear This
"Create an Entity Relationship Diagram to visualize the database design." / "The ERD helped us catch the missing junction table before we built it."
Related Terms
ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram)
An ERD is a visual map of your database — boxes for tables, lines showing how they connect.
Many-to-Many
Many-to-Many means rows on both sides can relate to many rows on the other side. Students can enroll in many courses, and courses can have many students.
Normalization
Normalization is the process of organizing your database to reduce data duplication.
One-to-Many
One-to-Many means one row in Table A can relate to many rows in Table B. One user can have many orders. One post can have many comments.
Schema
A database schema is the blueprint of your database — which tables exist, what columns they have, what types they are, and how they relate to each other.