Understanding ERML

Obada Khalili

Software Engineer @ Foothill Solutions
AI Student @ An-Najah National University

About the talk

  • We will be talking about a project of mine named ERML
  • ERML is an organization that namespaces an array of tools targeted towards the SQL community

Quick refresher on ERD and RM

ERML tries to fulfill a vision where you can visualize your database's ERD and RM, and generate SQL schema code, all from a single source
To meet this vision, it requires three primary components, and I will be covering them in this talk

ERML - The Language

ERML (Entity-Relationship Markup Language) is a language standard defined by me that aims to provide a complete solution to represent any ERD requirement, and to do that intuitively
@erml/parser is an open-source parser implementation of ERML standards

ERML - The Visualizer

  • An online ERD visualization tool that converts ERML code into SVG drawings
  • Quick tour
  • With that, we achieve the first piece of the vision; The ERD Visualizer

ERML - The DBML Compiler

  • DBML (Database Markup Language) is another language standard, set by Holistics, and it's designed to define and document database schemas and structures (relational models)
  • DBML has an online RM visualization tool; dbdiagram
  • DBML can be converted into SQL
  • ERML can hook into the DBML organization by providing a compiler to DBML, which achieves the second and third parts of ERML's vision; RM Visualizer and SQL schema code generator
An ERML-to-DBML compiler doesn't exist (yet), which moves us to the next part

Growing the Palestinian's Open-source Culture

  • The computer science community of the Palestinian youth targets all of its efforts and talent into solving competitive programming problems. This is a good skill to have, but it's important to know when to stop, and start channeling this effort into more practical areas of computer science, like open-source
  • Browse open-source projects that meet your requirements, choose one, and start solving its problems

Thank You