ERD

Technology & Computing abbreviation · Data & Database

ERD
Stands forEntity-relationship diagram
CategoriesTechnology & Computing

ERD stands for Entity-relationship diagram, a data & database abbreviation.

A diagram showing the entities in a database design, such as Customer, Order and Product, along with their attributes and the relationships and cardinalities between them. Designers sketch ERDs before creating tables.

Example: Attach the updated ERD so reviewers can see the new many-to-many link between students and courses.

Usage notes

Peter Chen introduced the entity-relationship model in a 1976 paper. Crow's foot notation, with forked line ends showing "many", is the most common style in practice. Tools such as dbdiagram.io and many database clients can generate diagrams from an existing schema.

More data & database abbreviations

  • DS – Data science
  • DWH – Data warehouse
  • EDA – Exploratory data analysis
  • EDW – Enterprise data warehouse
  • ELK – Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
  • ELT – Extract, load, transform
  • ETL – Extract, transform, load
  • FK – Foreign key
  • HDFS – Hadoop Distributed File System
  • JDBC – Java Database Connectivity
  • KV – Key-value (store)
  • MDM – Master data management

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