Disclosure: I build Schemity , a desktop ERD tool - this post is from our blog and uses it for the examples. TL;DR: Database views carry real responsibilities - reporting layers, security boundaries, API surfaces - but ERD tools either leave them out entirely (DBML has no view support despite requests since 2022) or draw them as if they were ordinary tables. Schemity displays views and materialized views as read-only entities with italic names and a bold view or mview token in the entit...