Suitable E-R notation for introductory DB design course? Good/free diagram tools?

Having presented data models to users at all levels of the business org chart as well as technical professionals up and down the Zachman Framework, hands down the most intuitive relationship notation has been crow's foot So most data modeling tools support a hybrid of IDEF1x notation with the substitution of crow's feet instead of the default IDEF1x notation This is sometimes referred to in the tools as "information engineering" or "Martin" notation, although neither is technically correct There are affordable tools out there will limited feature sets. I would point educators to the main data modeling tool vendors, though, as many offer affordable education licenses or community editions of their products For instance, CA offers a community edition (free) of ERwin Data Modeler and IBM/Telelogic Systems Architect has a long history of education-friendly licensing schemes. I'm guessing that other vendors offer similar licenses.

Having presented data models to users at all levels of the business org chart as well as technical professionals up and down the Zachman Framework, hands down the most intuitive relationship notation has been crow's foot. So most data modeling tools support a hybrid of IDEF1x notation with the substitution of crow's feet instead of the default IDEF1x notation. This is sometimes referred to in the tools as "information engineering" or "Martin" notation, although neither is technically correct.

There are affordable tools out there will limited feature sets. I would point educators to the main data modeling tool vendors, though, as many offer affordable education licenses or community editions of their products. For instance, CA offers a community edition (free) of ERwin Data Modeler and IBM/Telelogic Systems Architect has a long history of education-friendly licensing schemes.

I'm guessing that other vendors offer similar licenses.

Dia is free, and there are enough basic shapes to make E-R notation diagrams, and probably al others you've mentioned, but there are no guides that limit you to making only one type of diagram, which may confuse new users or people who don't know the specific notations. I used it for all my assignments in my database course where the prof asked for E-R diagrams.

A web-based database diagram tool that support crow's feet notation: SchemaBank. They have free plans and (I guess) education pricing for heavy-duty commercial plans.

Visual Paradigm is quite handy for diagraming, and the community edition is free (not all the features are available in that edition, but the ER diagram part is included).

Dia is a program I used a while back. There's also a Windows version available. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job.

Umbrello can produce ER diagrams aswell. These pieces of software market themselves more as UML/all-round diagram tools, however, so their ER-specific prestige may vary. But they might still be something worth looking at.

There was a similar question for an app for Linux, but the app is Java based so works on any Java-supporting platform: SQL Developer: sqldeveloper.solyp.com/download/index.html.

DBSchemaeditor it's crow's feet based, online (Silverlight based) and free. dbschemaeditor.com This tool has options to share diagrams, so a teacher can have access granted to the student's folders and check the progress of their excercises. HTH Braulio.

I've used LucidChart for similar courses and assignments. The ERD support is pretty solid. There's a free option that works well, but Lucid also offers free Pro accounts to students and teachers, so that's why I've been using.

I would say Umlet over Dia. It's really minimal, but you can use it as a standalone application or plug-in into eclipse and gets the job done.

SchemaCrawler is a free, open source tool that can generate E-R diagrams, with the help of GraphViz. You can use regular expressions to select the tables and columns you want to display. Relationships are inferred from commonly used naming conventions.

You should try Creately - Collaborative Online Diagramming. They have pretty comprehensive support for Crows Foot as well as other notations. It's free and the usability is exceptionally good.

I couldn't find Crows Foot database diagram notation on Creately. The options for drawing plain lines didn't show Crows Foot symbols either. Is it only available through the paid subscription?

– yukondude Sep 6 '09 at 16:18 If you create a Blank ER diagram and connect 2 entities using the 'connector' (found on the contextual toolbar) you should see a bunch of potential conn types. I use the 'Association' connector type that has all the different arrow heads reqd for Crows foot. – Chands Sep 7 '09 at 5:11 Right you are.

I was using a line rather than a proper connector. That being said, it doesn't seem to handle many-to-many relationships, which suggests to me that it's for drawing physical database schema diagrams, rather than true E-R diagrams. – yukondude Sep 8 '09 at 15:50.

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