Universal Data Modeling

Chapter 4. Design Patterns in Conceptual Data Modelling

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With a thorough understanding of the business requirements, you are now set to create the entity-relationship model. The goal of this design stage is to identify entities and relationships based on the business requirement document (BRD). You go through the BRD and record down all the business terms (nouns and verbs). Then you can map nouns into entities and verbs into relationships. The actual design process is certainly more complicated, but the workflow is clear. You have painted the picture of the operations in the BRD. By translating each flow in this picture into entities and relationships, you can successfully cover all aspects of the business, without missing important pieces from the model.

Traditionally, the design process starts from the different business objects in the business flows, i.e., the entities. You identify the unique entities, then dive into their relationships, thus forming the entirety of the ER model. More recently, there is also a practice ...