Database Reference
In-Depth Information
plains a business information landscape. A box with the word “Customer” within it rep-
resents the concept of a real
Customer
such as
Bob
,
IBM
, or
Walmart
on a data model. A
line represents a relationship between two concepts such as capturing that a
Customer
may
own one or many
Accounts
.
This chapter explains why data modeling is necessary for any database, relational or
NoSQL, and also introduces the publishing case study that appears in each of the following
chapters.
M
ANY
F
ORMS TO
R
EPRESENT AN
I
NFORMATION
L
ANDSCAPE
The result of the data modeling process is a data model, yet data models themselves can
be represented through many different forms. Data models can look like the box and line
drawings that are the subject of this topic, or they can take other forms such as Unified
Modeling Language (UML) Class Diagrams, spreadsheets, or State Transition Diagrams.
They can even take the form of precise business assertions generated from the answers to
business questions.
For example, here are four forms of data models:
Information Engineering
Fully Communication-Oriented Information
Modeling
Unified Modeling Language
The Axis Technique
