Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Key Words in Practice
Using these key word rules, let's look again at the statement given us by
Mountain View's CEO. We start by highlighting the nouns that will help us
establish our entity list. Before you read further, go back to the original
statement and come up with an entity list of your own; later you can com-
pare it to the list we came up with.
Customers
log on to our Web site and place an
order
,
or call an
employee
who places the
order
on the
customers'
behalf. All
orders
contain the cus-
tomer information, the
order detail,
which has information about the
products
and quantities that the
customer
purchased, and the
payment
method. When we receive the
order
into the system, the customer infor-
mation has already been checked and crucial bits, such as the customer's
address, have been verified by the site. The first thing we do is process
the
order items.
We make sure that the
products
being purchased are in
stock and we place a hold on those
products.
If a
product
is not in stock,
we place that item or the entire
order
on back order, depending on the
customer's
preference.
Products
that are in stock have a hold placed on
them. Once the
products
are on hold, we process the
payment
for the
order. By law, once we accept
payment,
we must ship within 30 days.
This is why we make sure the
product
is on hold before we process the
payment.
For
payment,
we take credit cards, gift cards, and direct bank
draft via an electronic check. After the
payment
has been cleared, we
send the
order
to the warehouse where is it picked, packed, and shipped
by our
employees.
We do this for about 1,000 orders per week.
You'll notice that we highlighted the possible entity nouns each time
they occurred. This helps us determine the overall criticality of each possi-
ble entity. Here is the complete list of possible entities from the statement:
Customer
■
Order
■
Order Detail, Order Item
■
Product
■
Payment
■
Employee
■
Each of the entities in this list describes something that the business
works with and needs to store data about. Most of them are obvious, but
payment was a little harder to pick out. Initially when going through the
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