Making data easy to understand is core to our mission at Secoda. Whether you’re a data engineer designing new pipelines or an analyst exploring the right tables to query, having a clear view of how your data is structured is critical.

With Secoda’s interactive Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), you can automatically detect and visualize table relationships, giving your team the clarity they need to understand your data architecture.

By bringing ERDs into the same platform as lineage, monitoring, cataloging, and AI search, Secoda gives teams a more complete and connected view of their data, all in one place.

What is an ERD?

An ERD provides a visual map of how tables in your database relate to one another. By showing relationships between tables, an ERD helps teams quickly understand which data they can combine and how to write accurate, efficient queries:

• Each table is represented as a box with its columns listed.
• Primary keys and foreign keys are highlighted.
• Relationships between tables are shown as lines or arrows, indicating how data is connected.

In modern cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, formal relationships aren’t always enforced, making it hard to visualize how your tables connect. Manually building an ERD is often a time-consuming process, which is why Secoda now automates this for you. 

How ERDs in Secoda work

By analyzing query join patterns in the data warehouse and constraints in the database, Secoda gives you a live, accurate view of your database relationships with no extra effort required.

Secoda ERDs automatically detect relationships between tables, even in complex schemas and queries, and present them in an organized, interactive layout. Users can zoom, pan, and filter the diagram, making it easy to navigate large datasets and find the information that matters most. Export capabilities also make it simple to share the ERD for documentation, discussions, or internal audits.

Whether you’re exploring a new schema or documenting an existing one, ERDs in Secoda help you and your broader team navigate your data with more confidence.

Value of ERDs in Secoda

A clear understanding of how your data is structured is essential for building trust, improving collaboration, and making informed decisions. ERDs make this possible by offering a visual, accessible view of your database schema, showing how tables and their columns connect.

With ERDs embedded directly within Secoda, they become even more impactful. Your team can explore table relationships alongside your data catalog, lineage, documentation, and monitoring, all in a single workspace. That means no more maintaining separate diagrams or switching between tools to get a full picture of your data.

In Secoda, you can search for tables or columns using AI, track schema changes over time, and keep ERDs automatically in sync with your documentation and metadata.

This integrated approach gives your team a shared, always-up-to-date view of how data is organized, making it easier to collaborate, troubleshoot, and govern effectively.

ERDs in Secoda help:

• Accelerate onboarding for new team members
• Bridge the gap between technical and non-technical users
• Reduce query errors and improve performance
• Support governance and compliance workflows
• Align teams by connecting structure, context, and data quality in one place

ERDs vs. lineage: What’s the difference?

Both ERDs and lineage diagrams offer visual insights into your data environment, but they serve different purposes.

How ERDs and lineage work together

ERDs and lineage offer two powerful, complementary perspectives on your data. When used together, they help teams build a complete understanding of how data is structured, how it flows, and how it is used across the organization.

ERDs give you a clear view of how tables are used together within your data model. Instead of just showing how your data is structured, they help answer practical questions like: How do I join the customers table to the products table to see what products each customer is using? This makes it easier to write accurate queries, design new models, and communicate how your data works. Because ERDs are accessible to both technical and less-technical stakeholders, they also support better conversations around data quality, privacy, and governance.

Lineage shows how data moves and transforms across systems, pipelines, and tools, from raw data all the way to business reports. It provides the traceability teams need for tasks like impact analysis, compliance, and debugging.

Together:

• You can start with an ERD to understand the current structure of your data warehouse.
• Then use Lineage to trace how that data flows through pipelines and into downstream tools.
• This combination helps teams spot redundancies, surface risks earlier, and ensure consistent understanding of both structure and flow.

Driving better governance and documentation

As data models evolve and more users engage with data, keeping track of structure and flow becomes harder to do manually. Automated ERDs and lineage in Secoda help you stay ahead:

• Governance: By making both the data model and data flow transparent, Secoda helps teams catch inconsistencies and maintain data integrity before they impact business decisions.
• Documentation: Automated visual models make it easier to onboard new team members, answer questions, and share critical context across the business.
• Efficiency: With a shared, always-up-to-date view of your data ecosystem, teams can move faster and with more confidence.

In short, combining ERDs with lineage helps you govern data more efficiently, without the overhead of manual mapping.

Common use cases for ERDs in Secoda

• Data modeling: Design and communicate schema changes visually.
• Onboarding: Help new team members ramp up quickly on database structure.
• Query optimization: Identify correct join paths and relationships.
• Governance & documentation: Maintain clear, up-to-date documentation of your data model.
• Compliance: Support data audits with visual evidence of approved relationships.

ERDs help answer foundational questions like:

• What tables should I use?
• How are they connected?
• How should I structure my queries?

In contrast, lineage helps answer:

• Where does this data come from?
• What happens to it along the way?
• Who is using this data downstream?

Closing

Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are now available in early access, giving teams a powerful new way to understand and navigate their data. 

When combined with lineage, monitoring, cataloging, and AI search, this feature brings us one step closer to a fully connected view of your data ecosystem, helping teams move faster with greater confidence. 

Ready to explore your data relationships?

See how automatically generated ERDs, integrated with lineage and monitoring, can give your team a clearer view of your data model. Start a free trial of Secoda today or connect with our team to learn more.

Want to dive deeper? Read the documentation and sign up for early access to start using ERDs today.