Entity Relationship Diagram / Entity Relationship Diagramming (ERD, ER Diagram)

Entity Relationship Diagram - A diagram representing entities, the relationship among them, and certain properties of the relationships, especially their maximum and minimum cardinalities.

[Category=Data Governance ]

Source: The Data Governance Institute, 03 December 2009 10:04:02, http://www.datagovernance.com/glossary-governance/

---

These advertisers support this free service

---

Entity Relationship Diagramming - A process that visually identifies the relationships between data elements.

[Category=Information Management ]

Source: Information-Management.com, 17 June 2010 12:42:55, http://www.information-management.com/glossary/e.html

---

Entity Relationship Diagram - A data relation diagram that represents the arrangement and relationship of data entities for the logical data structure. It is also known as an E-R diagram.

[Category=Data Warehousing ]

Source: Sun.com, 28 July 2010 10:06:27, http://www.sun.com/third-party/dw/brochures/67198.Acrobat.pdf

---

Entity Relationship Diagramming - A process that visually identifies the relationships between data elements.

[Category=Data Warehousing ]

Source: Sun.com, 28 July 2010 10:06:58, http://www.sun.com/third-party/dw/brochures/67198.Acrobat.pdf

---

entity-relationship diagram (ERD or ER diagram) - An entity-relationship diagram is a data modeling technique that creates a graphical representation of the entities, and the relationships between entities, within an information system.

The three main components of an ERD are:

   * The entity is a person, object, place or event for which data is collected. For example, if you consider the information system for a business, entities would include not only customers, but the customer's address, and orders as well. The entity is represented by a rectangle and labelled with a singular noun.
   * The relationship is the interaction between the entities. In the example above, the customer places an order, so the word "places" defines the relationship between that instance of a customer and the order or orders that they place. A relationship may be represented by a diamond shape, or more simply, by the line connecting the entities. In either case, verbs are used to label the relationships.
   * The cardinality defines the relationship between the entities in terms of numbers. An entity may be optional: for example, a sales rep could have no customers or could have one or many customers; or mandatory: for example, there must be at least one product listed in an order. There are several different types of cardinality notation; crow's foot notation, used here, is a common one. In crow's foot notation, a single bar indicates one, a double bar indicates one and only one (for example, a single instance of a product can only be stored in one warehouse), a circle indicates zero, and a crow's foot indicates many. The three main cardinal relationships are: one-to-one, expressed as 1:1; one-to-many, expressed as 1:M; and many-to-many, expressed as M:N.

The steps involved in creating an ERD are:

   * Identify the entities.
   * Determine all significant interactions.
   * Analyze the nature of the interactions.
   * Draw the ERD.

A number of CASE tools, such as Visible Analyst and Data Architect, can be used to generate ERDs.

Related glossary terms: Hancock, cooked data

[Category=Data Management ]

Source: WhatIs.com, 02 August 2013 09:08:02, http://whatis.techtarget.com/glossary/Data-and-Data-Management