Editor's Notes: Back At It
    by Scot A. Becker

Entity Relationship Modeling from an ORM perspective: Part 1
    by Dr. Terry Halpin

Entity Relationship modeling (ER) views the application domain in terms of entities that have attributes and participate in relationships. This view of the world is quite intuitive, and in spite of the recent rise of UML for modeling object-oriented applications, ER is still the most popular data modeling approach for database applications. However, one of the problems with the ER approach is that there are so many versions of it, with no single standard. In industrial practice, the most popular versions of ER are the Oracle and Information Engineering (IE) notations. Another popular data modeling notation is IDEF1X, but since this is a hybrid of ER and relational notation, I don't count it as a true ER representative. As discussed in earlier articles, UML class diagrams can be regarded as an extended version of ER. This article focuses on basic aspects of the Oracle notation for ER.

Detecting the Need for Paired Subsets
   by Dick Barden and Pat Hallock

Paired subset constraints are not used as often as many other constraints in ORM. However, there are certain situations that reveal the necessity for paired subset constraints. Recognizing these situations can be more challenging if fragments of a large pattern are scattered across different pages. At times you may not detect the need for this constraint until you get to the logical model.

Conceptual Modelling of Workflow Using the Intelligent Business Object Paradigm
   by Dr. Bill Karakostas and Dr. George Fakas

Object COMX
   by Dr. Judith Barnard

Dr. John K. Sharp
Analysis Problem
Solution for Last Issue's Analysis Problem

© Copyright, 1998-2004 InConcept (Information Conceptual Modeling, Inc.) All Rights Reserved. Privacy Statement.
ISSN: 1533-3825