Access Database Design and Programming, Second Edition

Entities and Their Attributes

The purpose of a database is to store information about certain types of objects. In database language, these objects are called entities . For example, the entities of the LIBRARY database include books, authors, and publishers.

It is very important at the outset to make a distinction between the entities that are contained in a database at a given time and the world of all possible entities that the database might contain. The reason this is important is that the contents of a database are constantly changing and we must make decisions based not just on what is contained in a database at a given time, but on what might be contained in the database in the future.

For example, at a given time, our LIBRARY database might contain 14 book entities. However, as time goes on, new books may be added to the database and old books may be removed. Thus, the entities in the database are constantly changing. If, for example, based on the fact that the 14 books currently in the database have different titles, we decide to use the title to uniquely identify each book, we may be in for some trouble when, later on, a different book arrives at the library with the same title as a previous book.

The world of all possible entities of a specific type that a database might contain is referred to as an entity class . We will use italics to denote entity classes. Thus, for instance, the world of all possible books is the Books entity class and the world of all possible authors ...