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ftl25 0 Junior Poster in Training

Hi,

Can anyone advise a good ER modelling tutorial/book or program? It is very time consuming to do ER diagrams in word.
Also, has anyone else has come across the 'Pet Practice' database modelling problem?

Thanks.

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A few focused recommendations for and anyone doing ER modelling exercises.

Good introductory books: Database Design for Mere Mortals (Michael J. Hernandez) for a practical, example-driven approach; Fundamentals of Database Systems (Elmasri & Navathe) or Database System Concepts (Silberschatz et al.) for textbook depth; SQL and Relational Theory (C. J. Date) for formal background. A concise refresher on the model and notation is available at the Entity-relationship model page.

If Word is slow, try lightweight diagram tools that support ER notation and export: diagrams.net (draw.io) for free drag-and-drop drawing, dbdiagram.io for textual-to-ER quick diagrams, or a DB tool with modeling built in (MySQL Workbench, pgModeler, DBeaver) if forward-/reverse-engineering to SQL is needed.

A short, practical workflow to turn a problem statement into an ERD:

  1. Extract nouns for candidate entities and verbs for relationships.
  2. Identify attributes and natural keys; pick surrogate keys only when necessary.
  3. Determine relationship cardinalities and optionality (1:1, 1:N, M:N).
  4. Resolve M:N with associative entities and capture attributes of relationships (e.g., appointment date).
  5. Normalize (up to 3NF normally) and then map to a relational schema.
  6. Prototype with sample data and iterate based on query/report requirements.

If the "Pet Practice" task is a veterinary/grooming-style exercise, pay attention to owner-pet dependency, visit/appointment as an entity (with service and billing attributes), and enforcing unique constraints (microchip id, licence) that affect keys and queries.

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