Intro to the E-R Diagram

Entity-Relationship (E-R) Modeling is one approach to visualize what story your data is trying to tell. This goal of this predecessor to object modeling (e.g. UML or CRC cards) is to give you a high-level, graphical view of the core components of an enterprise--the E-R diagram. An E-R diagram (sometimes called a Chen diagram, after its creator, Peter Chen) is a conceptual graph that captures meaning rather than implementation [1]. Once you have the diagram, you can convert it to a set of tables.