Database Reference
In-Depth Information
1.
Show me the number of students receiving financial aid by department and
semester for the last five years. [From Financial Aid Office]
2.
Show me the number of students on full or partial scholarship by department and
semester for the last four years. [From Accounting Department]
3.
How many students graduated by department and semester over the last three
years? [From Alumni Affairs]
4.
How many students applied to the university over the last ten years? I want to com-
pare applications from high school students vs. other universities. [From Admis-
sions Department]
STEP 3: CAPTURE THE RELATIONSHIPS
Now we need to identify how these concepts relate to each other. Again, relational and di-
mensional each have different approaches.
For Relational
Relational is all about capturing the business rules, so our objective at the relational con-
ceptual level is to determine which entities relate to each other and then articulate the rules.
Let's assume we met with the business users and sketched the following on a whiteboard
with them:
These concepts are the ones we identified from the prior step, with the exceptions of
Ac-
count Open Date
and
Account Balance
. We decided not to include these two concepts
because they seemed very granular and therefore properties that would appear on the logic-
al data model and not the conceptual.
