For years I've looked at those nutty UML schema diagrams and thought they seemed like nothing more than an elaborate compliance ritual, the sort of thing that a consultant might be required to deliver but that nobody will ever look at.

But today I kinda reinvented them, but with a much better cost-benefit ratio.

I need to think about the implications of recklessly deleting a record from table T. This diagram will help.

Arrows are foreign key relations. A→B labeled with c means that A.c is a foreign key that joins to B.id.

ALT