Visualize databases with Entity Relationship Diagrams in Lucidchart

  • 28 December 2023
  • 2 replies
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Well designed and thoroughly documented databases are crucial in helping software engineers build and maintain efficient, scalable and adaptable applications, and entity relationship diagrams are an established way to do this. With Lucidchart, you have both the flexibility to manually build an ERD from scratch using our Entity Relationship shape library and the convenience of importing database entities and relationships straight from your DBMS.

 

With our ERD import tool, you can run a query in your DBMS to generate a list of databases, tables and schemas to import straight into your Shape menu. Drag entities from the Shape menu onto the canvas to map out your database. Relationship lines are conveniently added automatically between entities wherever relationships are indicated in the list.  
 

 

Once built, your imported ERD can be kept up-to-date by updating the diagram with a new database file. You also have the option to export your ERD directly from Lucidchart in SQL format for upload to your DBMS, or JSON format for upload in Quickbase

 

Do you have any questions, tips or ideas on how to approach database modeling with ERDs?  Leave a comment below to share your thoughts!

 


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Hello Emma,

I would like to draw an Entity Relationship Chart using Lucidchart, but I'm facing some challenges. I want to avoid the manual task of building entities in Lucidchart. My database is Microsoft Dataverse (Dynamics 365), and unfortunately, I can't find any connectors to directly import the entities. My current approach is to get my entities into an Excel spreadsheet and then import them into Lucidchart. However, as I'm quite new to the system, I'm not sure how to proceed. Is there a way to import data into shapes, like field names, types, and relationships in Lucidchart?

I have an example of a CSV file when I try to export selected data from the entity relationship diagram, but is there a way to import the diagram from a CSV file? It would help greatly in my approach so that I can generate the CSV with the necessary fields and types and try to import it. Maybe there's another way to achieve this?

Thank you very much in advance for your reply

Best Regards

Dennis

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Hi Dennis! You might want to try writing a custom query to run in your database. Although Microsoft Dataverse isn’t one of the four supported DBMS our ERD import tool is designed for, you should still be able use it successfully if you can generate or modify an output file in the format the ERD import tool expects. 

I've attached an example output file from a PostGreSQL import for reference. I recommend trying to get an output file from Microsoft Dataverse in this format and then attempting the ERD import process described in my post above. Hope this helps!

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