CHAPTER THREE

DATA MODELING

(Key Words)

Aggregation Relationship – A special purpose UML notation representing the relationship

between two classes that are often considered together, such as when a sports league is
made up of a collection of teams.

Association – UML symbol that depicts the relationship between two classes; it is modeled as
a solid line that connects two classes in a model.

Attributes- Data elements that describes instances in a class, very much like fields in a
database table.

Business Rule – Succinct statements of constraints on business processes; the provide the
logic that guides the behaviour of the business in specific situations.

Cardinalities – See Multiplicities

Class – Any separately identifiable collection of things (objects) about which the organization
wants to collect and store information. Classes can represent organization resources (e.g.,
trucks, machines, buildings, cash, investments), persons (e.g., customers, employees), events
( e.g., sales, purchases, cash disbursement, cash receipts), and conceptual structures (e.g.,
accounts, product categories, budgets). Classes are typically implemented as tables in a
relational database, where individual instances of the class are represented as rows in the
table.

Class Diagrams – Structure models prepared using UML notation.

Composition Relationship – A special –purpose UML notation representing the relationship

between two classes that are often considered together, similar to aggregation relationships,
except in composition relationships, one class cannot exist without the other, such as a book
and the chapters that compose the book.

Constraints – Optional or mandatory guidance about how a process should perform in certain
situations.

Data Model- A graphic representation of the conceptual contents of databases; data models
support communication about database contents between users and designers of the
database.

Entities- The people, things, and events in the domain of interest; in UML notation, entities are
modeled as classes.
Foreign Key- Attribute that allows database tables to be linked together; foreign keys are the
primary keys of other tables placed in the current table to support the link between the two
tables.

Generalization Relationship- A special-purpose UML symbol that supports grouping of things

that share common characteristics; it reduces redundancy because the shared characteristics
need only be modeled once.

Multiplicities- UML symbols that describe the minimum and maximum number of times an
instance of one class can be associated with instances of another class for a specific
association between those two classes; they indicate whether the two classes are part of one-
to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many relationships.

Primary Key- An attribute or a combination of attributes that uniquely identifies an instance of

a class in a data model or a specific row in a table.

Relationship- The business purpose for the association between two classes or two database
tables; association.

Structure Model- A conceptual depiction of a database, such as a UML class model or an

entity-relationship model