This tour takes about five minutes and gets you from a blank screen to a real ERD. It assumes you have already installed the database design software (see Install & First Launch).
1. Open a diagram
On the workspace screen, open the seeded Sample Blog Diagram to see a finished schema, or click + above the diagram list and create a diagram without connecting to a database to start an empty one. See Connections Overview for what each field means.
2. Add your first entity
On the canvas, add an entity (Schemity’s term for a table) and name it users. Add a few fields - an id marked PK, an email, and a created_at. Field editing is covered in Entities & Fields.
3. Add a related entity
Add a second entity, orders. Draw a relationship from orders to users; Schemity adds the foreign key field and renders the link in crow’s foot notation as one-to-many. Relationships are covered in Relationships.
4. Focus the view
If your real schema is large, you will not want every entity on one canvas. Create a Context View that shows only the entities relevant to a feature.
5. Save it
Schemity writes your diagram to disk as JSON in the workspace folder. To version it, keep the workspace inside a Git repository and commit:
git add docs/erd/
git commit -m "Add users and orders ERD"Your schema is now under version control, reviewable in a pull request like any other change. That is the point of Git-native storage.
Where to go next
- Connect to a real database in Connections Overview.
- Reverse-engineer an existing schema in Reverse-Engineer an Existing Database.