Chapter 2 Flashcards
What is an entity?
- Entity instance - person, place, object, event, concept (often corresponds to a row in a table)
- Entity type - collection of entitities (often corresponds to a table)
What are relationships?
Relationship instance - link between entities (corresponds to primary key-foreign key equivaltencies in related tables)
Relationsihp type - category of relationship.. link between entity types
What are attributes?
Properties or characteristics of an entity or relationship type (often corresponds to a field in a table)
Sample E-R Diagram
Basic E-R notation (visualized)
What are business rules?
Statements that define or constrain some aspect of the business.
What are business rules derived from?
Policies, procedures, events, and functions
What are some aspects of business rules?
- Assert business structure
- Control/influence business behavior
How are business rules expressed/automated?
- They are expressed in terms that are familiar to end users
- Automated through DBMS software
What are the components of a good business rule?
- Declarative
- Precise
- Atomic
- Consistent
- Expressable
- Distinct
- Business-oriented
Business Rules - What does declarative mean?
What, not how
Business Rules - What does precise mean?
Clear, agreed-upon meaning
Business rules - What does atomic mean?
One statement
Business rules - What does consistent mean?
internally and externally consistent
Business Rules - What does expressible mean?
Structured, natural language
Business Rules - What does distinct mean?
non-redundant
Business Rules - What does business-oriented mean?
Understood by business people
What are the components of a good data name?
- Related to business, not technical, characteristics
- Meaningful and self-documenting
- Unique
- Readable
- Composed of words from an approved list
- Repeatable
- Written in standard syntax
What is a data definition?
Explanation of a term or fact
What is a term?
word or phrase with specific meaning
What is a fact?
association between two or more terms
What are the guidelines for good data definition?
- Concise description of essential data meaning
- Gathered in conjunction with systems requirements
- Accompanied by diagrams
- Achieved by consensus, and iteratively refined
What is an entity?
a person, place, object, event, or concept in the user environment about which the organization wishes to maintain data
What is an entity type?
A collection of entities that share common properties or characteristics.
What is an entity instance?
A single occurrence of an entity type
Entity type/instance example
What should be an entity?
- An object that will have many instances in the database
- An object that will be composed of multiple attributes
- An object that we are trying to model
What should an entity not be?
- A user of the database system
- An output of the database system (e.g. a report)
Example of Appropriate/Innappropriate entities
What are characteristics of a strong entity?
- Exists independently of other types of entities
- Has it’s own unique identifier (identifiter underline with single line)
What are the characteristics of a weak entity?
- Dependent on a strong entity (identifying owner), cannot exists on its own
- Does not have a unique identifier (only a partial identifier)
- Entity box and partial identifier have double lines
What is an identifying relationship in relation to entities?
- Links strong entities to weak entities
Stong vs. Weak entity visualized
What are the guidelines for naming entities?
- Singular Noun
- Specific to organization
- Concise, or abbreviation
- For event entities, the result not the process
- Name consistent for all diagrams
What are the guidelines for defining entities?
- “an X is”
- Describe unique characteristics of each instance
- Explicit about what is and is not the entity
- When an instance is created or destroyed
- Changes to other entity types
- History that should be kept
What is an attribute?
Property or characteristic of an entity or relationship type