ERDs!

An ERD is a data model that stands for entity relationship diagram. These ERDs are important because they allow businesses to see how certain entities in a relationship work together/ relate to one another and the components of each entity. These diagrams are a visual representation of how entities within a system relate to each other. These entities can be people, places, objects, and events in any sort of information technology system. The two notations in an ERD are Chen’s notation and Crow’s foot notation. In Chen’s notation, a diamond is placed to represent the relationship with the relationship name. This notation describes a relationship and cardinality through symbols and lines. The three symbols are rectangles, which represent the entities, circles which represent the attributes, and lastly diamonds which represent the relationship. On the other hand, Crow’s foot notation represents these relationships through boxes and lines. The different shapes placed at the ends of the lines represent the cardinality of the relationship. When we first began learning about ERDs, I was a bit confused about the term cardinality. Cardinality is defined as “the number of elements in a set, as a property of that grouping”, meaning that an entity or many of the same entity can relate to zero, one, or many of a specific entity.   The different types of cardinality are one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. A zero can be placed at the end of the connecting line as well, which means that it can include the option for zero, such as zero, one or zero, and zero or many. For example, if the cardinality is one to zero or many, one entity can exist only as one and is not optional but on the other side, the entity can still exist even if not related to an object, making the relationship optional. Zero or many means that zero, one or many can exist. 

In our Max labs, we created our own ERD, which allowed us to visualize and manipulate one ourselves. We used dynamic dashboards in salesforce. These dashboards are personalized platforms that allow businesses to update and add new business content and data. This allows the creator to share important and specific information with people such as clients, customers, employees, CEOs, etc.  You can personalize the permissions without having to create a separate dashboard for each level of accessibility.