Guides
17 guides on database design. Practical writing from the team building Atlas, useful whether or not you buy anything.
Data modeling is the developer skill that pays off every day and gets taught almost never. This guide covers the practical core: the concepts that make your schemas clean and your queries sane.
DBML lets you describe a database in a few readable lines of text and get an ERD from it. It is diagram-as-code for schemas, and this guide covers the syntax and the workflow.
Normalization sounds like theory, but it is really about one practical goal: store every fact exactly once. Seeing it on a diagram turns the abstract rules into obvious moves.
Your SQL DDL already defines every table, key, and constraint. Turning CREATE TABLE statements into an ERD is a translation exercise, and this guide gives you the mapping.
Your Prisma schema already describes every entity and relationship in your database. Turning it into an ERD is less about drawing and more about translating what the schema already says.
A good database schema is invisible: it just works, for years, as the application grows. A bad one leaks into every query and migration. This guide is about getting it right early.
An entity relationship diagram turns a fuzzy idea of your data into a precise picture of entities, keys, and relationships. This guide walks through making one from scratch.
DBML is a concise text language for defining database schemas that render as diagrams. This guide covers its syntax for tables, references, enums, and indexes with working examples.
A Prisma schema is already a precise data model in text. This guide shows how to read its models and relations and turn them into a clear entity relationship diagram.
Schema decisions are hard to reverse once real data depends on them. These battle-tested best practices help you get naming, keys, constraints, and types right the first time.
The fastest way to learn ER modeling is to study real examples. This guide walks through three annotated schemas, a blog, an e-commerce store, and a SaaS app, and the decisions behind each.
Cardinality decides where foreign keys and junction tables live. This guide explains one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships and how to implement each correctly.
Normalization is the discipline of storing each fact in exactly one place. This guide explains 1NF, 2NF, and 3NF with a running example and shows when normalizing further stops paying off.
Crow's foot notation is the most widely used way to express cardinality in ERDs. This reference decodes every symbol so you can read and draw any relationship line with confidence.
The best ERD tool depends on whether you want to type your schema, draw it, or generate it. This honest roundup compares the leading options in 2026 by their real strengths.
Good schema design is a repeatable process, not a talent. This walkthrough takes you from requirements to a normalized, constrained, indexed schema using a worked example.
An entity relationship diagram is the blueprint of a database before it exists. This guide covers entities, attributes, relationships, and cardinality, and how to turn a diagram into a real schema.
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