8.1. Overview of ER
The Entity Relationship (ER) modeling approach views a business domain in terms of entities that have attributes and participate in relationships. For example, the fact that an employee was born on a date is modeled by a birthdate attribute of the Employee entity type, whereas the fact that an employee works for a department is modeled as a relationship between them. This world view is quite intuitive, and despite the recent rise of UML for modeling object-oriented applications, ER is still the most popular data modeling approach for database applications.
In Chapter 1, we argued that ORM is better than ER for conceptual analysis. However, ER is widely used, and its diagrams are good for compact summaries, so you should become ...
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