ERD Symbols and Meanings

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) is a popular software engineering tool for database modeling and illustration the logical structure of databases, which uses one of two notations - Chen's or Crow’s Foot. Crow's foot notation is effective when used in software engineering, information engineering, structured systems analysis and design. Each of these notations applies its own set of ERD symbols. Crow's foot diagrams use boxes to represent entities and lines between these boxes to show relationships. Varied shapes at the ends of lines depict the cardinality of a given relationship. Chen's ERD notation is more detailed way to represent entities and relationships. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM application enhanced with all-inclusive Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution allows design professional ER diagrams with Chen's or Crow’s Foot notation on your choice. It contains the full set of ready-to-use standardized ERD symbols and meanings helpful for quickly drawing, collection of predesigned ERD samples, examples and templates. ConceptDraw Pro is a great alternative to Visio for Mac users as it offers more features and can easily handle the most demanding professional needs.

Entity Relationship Diagram Symbols

The semantic modeling method nowadays is successfully applied in database structure design. It is effective method of modeling the data structures, which is based on the meaning of these data. As a tool of semantic modeling, there are used different types of Entity-Relationship Diagrams. Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) is applied to visually and clearly represent a structure of a business database. The main components of ERDs are: entity, relation and attributes. An entity is a class of similar objects in the model, each entity is depicted in the form of rectangle and has the name expressed by a noun. Relation is shown in the form of non-directional line that connects two entities. There are several notation styles used for ERDs: information engineering style, Chen style, Bachman style, Martin Style. The Entity Relationship Diagram symbols used for professional ERD drawing are predesigned by professionals and collected in the libraries of the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution for ConceptDraw DIAGRAM software.

What's the best ERD tool for the Mac?

What's the best ERD tool for the Mac? ConceptDraw DIAGRAM on Mac OS X supplied with Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) Solution from the Software Development Area for ConceptDraw Solution Park is the best ERD tool! This solution offers for ConceptDraw users so powerful drawing tools, libraries with numerous ERD objects, which will help design ER diagrams of any complexity and any design you want.

Entity Relationship Diagram Software Engineering

Entity Relationship Diagram (aka ER Diagram, E-R Diagram, ERD) is a time-tested and widespread software development and software engineering method for data modeling, illustrating the logical structure of databases and system design. For ERDs construction are used three basic elements: entities, attributes, and relationships. Chen's notation for ERD supposes the use of rectangles (boxes) to represent entities and diamonds to depict relationships between first-class objects. This notation is popular when creating conceptual data models of information systems. Another standardized notation for ER diagrams is Crow's foot notation. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM as a powerful Entity Relationship Diagram software engineering provides the tools of Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution from Software Development area of ConceptDraw Solution Park for instantly describing databases using ERDs of Crow’s Foot and Chen’s notations. Use the predesigned vector elements for both these notations from 2 libraries included to Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution.

Entity-Relationship Diagram

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) is the world-known way to show the logical structure of databases in visual manner. The best software tool for drawing Entity-Relationship Diagram is ConceptDraw DIAGRAM ector graphics software with Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution from Software Development area which gives the ability to describe a database using the Entity-Relationship model. The vector graphic diagrams produced using this solution can be successfully used in whitepapers, presentations, datasheets, posters, or any technical materials.

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Drawing ER diagrams on a Mac

The drawing of ER diagrams on a Mac, PC with Windows or on the computer with cross-platform environment is smooth and incredibly easy when you have professional ERD drawing software tool well-suited for both these platforms. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM software extended with Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution from Software Development Area of ConceptDraw Solution Park is certainly the best tool for drawing ER diagrams. Use the powerful drawing tools of the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution, built-in templates, samples, examples and 2 libraries ERD Chen's Notation and ERD Crow’s Foot Notation with numerous predesigned vector objects for easy drawing the ER diagram of any type that you need. A few simple steps will allow you to achieve the best result and design great-looking ER diagram: drag the required vector objects from the libraries offered by Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) Solution on your document, connect them in a needed order, apply the commands from the Action menus of these objects, edit the diagram's style with Line, Fill, Shadow and Text tools.

ER Diagram Programs for Mac

ConceptDraw DIAGRAM compatible Mac OS X software extended with powerful Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) Solution from the Software Development Area for ConceptDraw Solution Park is one of the famous ER Diagram Programs for Mac. It gives the perfect ability to draw ER diagrams for visually describing databases with Chen's and Crow's Foot notation icons.

Components of ER Diagram

Entity-Relationship model gives the possibility to visually describe a database using the components of ER Diagram, entity relationship stencils, relationship symbols, work flow shapes. ER-diagram lets represent the data or entities, attributes of these entities and relationships between them, using standardized Crow’s Foot notation icons or Chen’s notation icons. An entity is an object of the real world, it can exist independently and has the instances which differ in attribute values (properties). The attributes give an unambiguous (uniquely) identification for the instance and are called the primary key, this key can be composite and combine several attributes. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM is a professional software available with Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution from Software Development area that lets create ERDs for various database systems, using Crow’s Foot and Chen’s notations. It is invaluable tool for software engineers and developers, it supports ODBC-compatible databases (Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, MS SQL, InterBase, Firebird and others).