I'm wanting to build the database from scratch, practice setting up the ERD and filling the tables with data.
Any free software out there you can recommend?

Thanks

if you just want the database, sqlite is a free lightweight solution. wide variety of front ends you can use. there's also postgres which has more features and is also free.

There's mysql workbench if you are using mysql.

mysql with phpmyadmin is nice and easy

For our Database assignment we were allowed to use either ERDplus or DrawIO. That is for the Entity Relationship Diagrams. I used ERDplus.

As for the actual database itself, we used codeanywhere to set up the database and then used phpmyadmin with mysql to create the database and store the data.

When it comes to coding I still only use notepad++

For me it is nice and simple to open up a program and just type out the code.