Practical SQL Handbook, The: Using SQL Variants, Fourth Edition

The Entity-Relationship Approach Summarized

Entity-relationship modeling is much larger, more precise, and more detailed than the procedures that we discussed so briefly here indicate. However, the approach just outlined can help you design a good database that checks out against the next design methodology to be considered, the normalization rules. Before we turn to that topic, here is a review list of the basic steps discussed so far:

1.	Represent each independent entity (book, author, publisher, editor, employee, department, student, course, company, and so on) as a base table.
2.	Represent each property of an entity (author's address, book's price, and so on) as a column of the entity's table.
3.	Make sure each table has a primary key. The ...