The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist. – commonly, but inaccurately, attributed to a 1969 Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan

This unit is a more extended treatment of the material on database modeling covered in CS 262.

  1. Read Chapter 3.

    1. Compare and contrast the database and the software design processes. Are agile modeling practices applicable to database design as well?

    2. Explain the following terms: entities, relationships (including cardinality and participation constraints), attributes (simple, composite, multi-valued and derived).

    3. Explain weak entities and identifying relationships.

    4. Model a person-household database (from class 2) using an ERD.

    5. Skim the material in Section 3.8 on UML diagrams; we won’t use them here but we did in CS 262 and will again in unit 11.

    Note the ERD reference sheet in Figure 3.14.

  2. Read Chapter 9.

    1. Map the person-household ERD model from above to a relational database model.

    2. Explain how to map from a UML model to a relational database model. We will address this issue more carefully in a later unit (on object-relational mapping).