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"Erskine, Bonnie" wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Half of our development staff uses Visio and the rest insist on this beast
> called ERwin. Not knowing ERwin from Adam, here's my quandry... these
> diagrams need to be associated/embedded in docs. Has anyone ever published
> ERwin diagrams (successfully) to a doc parked/accessed via the web... or
> better yet, in a Word doc?
>
> To keep all parties smiling, it looks like an ERwin class looms on our doc
> team's horizon... the only problem? We can't seem to find one. Has anyone
> found (good) formal ERwin training?
The ER stands for Entity Relationship, a technique used in data modelling.
There's a whole literature on it, both academic research and applications.
Try a web search on those terms.
Simplifying, and possibly getting it wrong since databases aren't my area:
There are assorted techniques for organising databases. The main feature
of the ER model is that everything is either E or R. e.g. You might have
employee records; each employee is an entity. They go in an E table.
You should not, however, have a "supervisor" field in each employee record.
Instead have a separate table for the relationship. An R table has only two
entries per line, in this case employee and supervisor.
One payoff is that to find everyone Fred supervises, you don't have to
look at all the employee records, only the smaller R table. This can be
done very efficiently if you sort or index the R table.
Another is that all R tables can be read in either direction. "Fred
supervises Susan" or "Susan works for Fred".
Mostly the ER model is used as a design tool, a way of thinking about
the problems.
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