Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Data Model
- A specification of data structures and business rules.
Entities
- Abstractions of real world things
- Any distinguishable person, place, thing, event or concept about which information is
kept
- A collection of like things called instances
- An instance is a single occurrence of an entity
Types of Entities
- Independent Entity
- Dependent Entity
- Characteristic Entity
- Associative Entity
- Super-type Entity
- Sub-type Entity
Independent Entity
- Does not depend on any other for its identification
- rectangular box
Dependent Entity
- Depends on one or more other entities for its identification (The primary key contains
foreign keys)
- rounded box
Characteristic Entity
- A group of attributes that occurs many times for an entity, and is not directly identified
by any other entity; a dependent entity with only one identifying parent.
Associative Entity
- an entity that inherits its primary key from two or more other entities (those
associated)
Super-type Entity
- The top of any level of a sub-type hierarchy
Sub-type Entity
- a subset of the instances of a super-type entity that share common attributes or
relationships distinct from other subsets. The sub-type entity inherits all of the properties
of the generic parent.
Attributes
- The properties of an entity
Types of attributes:
- Primary Key
- Primary Key Attributes
- Candidate Key
- Alternate Key
- Inversion Entry
- Non-key Attribute
Primary Key
- An attribute or group of attributes chosen as the unique identifier of an entity
Candidate Key
- an attribute or group of attributes possibly chosen as a primary key
Alternate Key
- a candidate key not chosen as the primary key
Inversion Entry
- an attribute or group of attributes frequently used to access the entity but may not
result in finding exactly one instance
Non-Key Attribute
- an attribute not chosen as part of the primary key of the entity
Relationships
- A connection between two entities
- IDEF1X relationships are binary--connecting exactly two entities.
Relationship Types
- Identifying
- Non-Identifying
- Non-Specific
Identifying
- primary key attributes of the parent entity become part of the primary key of the child
entity
Non-Identifying
- primary key attributes of the parent entity become part of the non-key attributes of the
child entity
Nonspecific
- a presentation style relationship contributing no foreign keys and relating many of one
entity to many of another entity; allowed only in entity relationship diagrams
Cardinality
One to Zero or Many Identifying
One to One or Many Identifying
One to Zero or One Identifying
One to Exactly N Identifying