identifying entities and attributes
The project description developed in W1 Assignment 3 is a first draft, so consider it a rough draft. This means that you should continue to develop your idea.
The next step is to select some nouns in your project description. For example, a project has invoices, invoice distributions, and suppliers as nouns. These nouns are entities, or tables, that would be used to create the E-R model. Then, the adjectives and verbs that describe the nouns would become the attributes, or columns.
Therefore, in the example that we considered, we might have the following entities and attributes:
Invoices | Invoice_Distributions | Suppliers |
# Invoice_id | # Invoice_distribution_id | # Supplier_id |
Invoice_num | Invoice_distribution_line_num | Name |
Invoice_type | Line_type | Address |
Supplier_id | Invoice_id |
Using your knowledge of selecting entities and attributes, complete the following tasks for this week:
- Review your project descriptions and come up with five entities and some attributes that describe the entities. Do not identify more than five attributes for each entity.
- In a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, define six columns (nouns) from the project description you submitted in W1 Assignment 3 that you consider key to your database. These will be the tables for the database. Then, in the rows for each column, define the attributes (adjectives).
You have taken your creative idea and started to move the nouns and adjectives you identified in a logical model—the E-R model. This will give you a working outline of the tables that will be created in the final script.