Re: Entity vs. Table

"Alan" <alan_at_erols.com> wrote in message news:2j5t5nFtq4a6U1_at_uni-berlin.de...

> The basic divisions are:
>
> Business Requirements
> flows to
> Conceptual Design (ERD or other)
> flows to
> Logical Design (Mapping to Relational Schema (tables))
> flows to
> Physical Design (Indexes, Storage Structures, and other RDBMS-independent
> items)

I strongly agree with the above.

There is only one minor place where my terminology differs.

I would have called the logical design structures "relations" rather than "tables", and I would have listed
"tables" right next to indexes at the physical design level. The mapping between relations and tables is so simple that we (including myself) often treat them as interchangeable. But they really aren't.

I might have used the terms "conceptual model", "logical model", and "physical model" im place of "concpetual design", "logical design" and "physical design". But that's just the difference between naming the process and naming the result.

On another subtopic, there is widespread disagreement on what the word "model" means in this forum. To me, diagrams are models. To His Holiness, Leandro the first, they are not. Received on Mon Jun 14 2004 - 18:01:43 CEST