The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling

Silverston c06.tex V2 - 11/21/2008 3:09am Page 286

286 Chapter 6 ■ Status: The States of Data

understanding of how this pattern would work. The pattern also assumes that

the different categories have the same attributes and relationships.

Status Type with Multi Rollup and Rules Pattern

As the business process of enterprises become more complicated, data can

travel many paths through an enterprise and may be required to go through

various statuses, rules, phase gates, or audit regulations that require data to

behave in a particular way. Regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley

may require that a piece of data should never be in a particular state without

having passed t hrough other processes, for example, that budgeting informa-

tion should not be in a status of ‘‘Approved’’ before it passes though a state

of ‘‘Regulatory Compliance Review Completed.’’ A regulation or requirement

may require that one state is mutually exclusive of another state, or in other

words, one status excludes another status. For example, a balance sheet with

many general ledger account balances may have a status of ‘‘Audited’’ or

‘‘Failed Audit Compliance’’ but never both of these at the same time; thus, one

of these states must be excluded if another state is current. It can also be the

case that one status has superseded another status over time, for example, a

status of ‘‘Complied’’ may be superseded by a status ...