Re: ER diagram?

[dialist <pvspam-dialist hacklab net>]

On Mon, 2003-04-07 at 15:30, joe panico wrote:
> Also, I've browsed the mailing list a bit, and it seems that many (most?)
> people who are doing ER diagramming are using the UML sheet, rather than the
> ER sheet. Is that because the ER shapes don't allow direct inclusion of
> Attributes _in_ the Entities?

I've not seen anything about the ER shapes that would allow for actual
database representation. It seems more for the "academic" ER
diagramming... trying to show relationships of very high-level abstract
objects.

It may be my own ignorance, but I don't really see the point of ER
diagramming using those shapes. I've seen a tutorial on it, and frankly,
the exercise seemed futile. Perhaps someone can enlighten us as to what
those ER shapes are used for In Real Life.

> Any tips appreciated,

If your purpose in using Dia is to create tables, views, sequences, and
in general a working SQL DDL script for your database of choice, use the
UML shapes.

SQL-->Dia is the Autodia project,
Dia-->SQL is the tedia2sql project.

If you intend your ER diagram to generate SQL DDL, I recommend first
browsing http://tedia2sql.tigris.org/usingtedia2sql.html.

-- 
Tim Ellis
Senior Database Architect and author, tedia2sql (http://tedia2sql.tigris.org)
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