Monday, April 15, 2013

Points To Note In A Data Modeling Tutorial

By Adele Madden


Every organization will store information to increase efficiency. This can be records of employees or the products it deals with. To realize this, they will require a database which will be used to store these records. A database is normally in form of rows and columns. But before coming up with the records, there is a sequence of activities that give rise to this. Data Modeling Tutorial will describe some of the notes to consider. Below is a description of them.

The first idea to take into account is the kind of information that will be kept in rows and columns and the respective titles of columns. In this process, we call all these information that will form the columns as entities and the others that will fill the rows as attributes. For instance, consider a database on employees information, First Name, Last Name, Employee Identification number will form some of the entities.

The second note to implement will be the primary key. This key will uniquely identify information in tables, the table is the collection of rows and column. Imagine again a record of students, the student identification number will be the primary key since it will uniquely identify the student.

Another key to consider is the foreign key. In database development, it refers to a column or a group of attributes that provide links amongst tables. The tables database have to communicate with each other, to achieve this, the designer must identify how these can be achieved by selecting some foreign keys.

After identifying the foreign key or secondary key, you will have to establish relationships. This will be another very vital point to note in the modeling process. All the records in the database must communicate and associate with each other for proper information access. There are three types of relationships, one to one relationship is a unidirectional kind of relationship where a particular table can communicate to only one other. In one to many, a table can communicate or share information with more than one tables. The last kind is many to many relationships, here, there is no limit in sharing of information.

How information will move or flow in the database should also be a very vital consideration. This is what has always been referred to hierarchy in modeling these relationships. There are different approaches to these, either top-down approach or bottom-up approach. Without flow of information within the database, we can not effectively enjoy the services we envisage from it.

Before we conclude, we must also go through another important element in software modelling. This is inheritance. Every database must a have a sequential flow of information within it. In every relational database, there exists a parent to child relationship. Definitely, you will not expect parent to inherit anything from a child. That is the same concept applied in software development. In a record, the entities should be arranged in a manner that gives an impression of age and time in order to realize this facility.

Finally, the last point to note will relate to the reference data. This is the identity that clearly defines particular database. For example, in a database that stores records of different countries in the world, the country code can be the most apt reference idea. Those are the points to consider in a Data Modeling Tutorial.




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