Entity Relationship Diagram

An Entity-Relationship (ER) model is essentially a blueprint for how data is structured within your application. It’s like a map that shows the different types of data (entities), such as users, products, or articles, and the connections (relationships) between them, like a user owning a product or an article belonging to a category.

When designing a web app, you use an ER model to plan out what data you need to store and how each piece of data is linked to others. This model helps in creating databases effectively by defining tables (entities) and how these tables relate through foreign keys (relationships). For instance, if you’re developing a shopping site, your ER model might show a direct relationship between customers and orders, and between products and orders, clarifying how these entities interact within the database.