February 4, 2026 at 4:01 pm
This is a generic question. To the moderators, I wasn't sure where to place this.
I mostly work in the BI space now.
Is it common in the industry for the team managing an app or data source to maintain an ERD? The places I've worked in the past few years are no longer doing this. I'm just curious if my experience is an aberration.
Thanks!
February 4, 2026 at 4:25 pm
In my experience, ERDs are common during the initial database design phase, but rarely maintained as changes are made.
February 5, 2026 at 6:24 am
It should be available and incorporated in a decent development and maintenance process.
That being said, I join Phil's experience.
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February 5, 2026 at 6:15 pm
I used to see this more common 15 years ago, but lately it seems no one has one. It doesn't help the tooling has gotten a bit expensive, even for view only people.
Disclosure: I work for Redgate Software and we make Redgate Data Modeler. We're slowly trying to enhance this to make it easier to maintain for people. I've blogged a bit about it: https://voiceofthedba.com/tag/data-modeler/
February 5, 2026 at 6:58 pm
price should not be the reason - there are some free tools to use. and others (like EA from sparkx) isn't that expensive.
February 11, 2026 at 5:38 pm
If you feed your schema to AI, it should be able to generate something like an ERD. But, sometimes the business doesn't feel comfortable with AI having that information. I also agree with Phil that the ERDs seem to make more sense during design than in ongoing development. But if you get thrown into a project with complicated schema maybe it'll help.
February 11, 2026 at 10:27 pm
Thanks for the responses. So.... definitely seems like we are all in the same boat. Good to know!
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