
to first figure out what the entities are, and then the attributes that belong to them,
rather than coming up with a list of attributes and trying to group them.
Entities that are represented in a database design are not individual instances of
things, but are the information that describes these things. For instance, a bank may
issue several million private label credit cards, but the kind of information that is used
to describe each cardholder’s account is identical.
Entities are represented by boxes in IDEF1X, and attributes are lines of text
within them. Figure 3.1 gives an IDEF1X example of an entity called Credit Card
Account, which has the follo ...