FileMaker Relationship Diagram

Oct 06, 2020 rap

When building a Relationship Database (RDB), the first thing to do is make a Relationship Diagram of stuff that will be going into the RDB.

ANRL’s RDB is the first big Database I’ve ever built and if I had to do it again I would do it simpler, better, and easier to work with. I just kept on adding more but didn’t clean up very much. I can work with that and I can find what I need but if someone looked at it, they would say that it looks like a bowl of spaghetti.

Here is a .pdf of the Relationship Diagram. It’s 4 pages. While most things are connected, there are quite a few unconnected and unused tables off to the right side. Please don’t show it to anybody… they would laugh.

Note that this isn’t just a pretty picture, it’s the place in FileMaker where relationships are defined. It’s very functional.

Each table has a primary key (named with a prefix of _PK) and one or more foreign keys (named with a prefix of _FK…). With this, they float to the top of the list when sorted alphabetically.

If we have meetings on RDB, then I’ll show this diagram as an example of what I’m doing.

FileMaker is amazing. It helps you as you go along and debugging isn’t that bad. It has worked for me for ~10 years.

I’d suggest using the LinkedIn Learning (Part of LinkedIn) site that was previously called lynda.com.