Conceptual vs. Actual Model of a Database
Explore how to identify business entities and their relationships through conceptual models. Understand how these relationships are implemented in actual database designs using primary and foreign keys, enabling effective data organization. This lesson helps you grasp the foundational concepts of database modeling and design necessary for working with relational databases like MySQL.
We'll cover the following...
Conceptual model
If we’re going to implement a data management application, we’ll probably need to design the database. First, we have to identify our business entities and map them to tables. Having identified the business entities, we then have to identify the relationships between these entities. These relationships can be any of the following:
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One-to-one (1-1): One business entity is related to another single business entity.
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One-to-many (1-n): One business entity is related to many other business entities.
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Many-to-many (m-n): Many business entities are related to many other business entities.
Note: The type of relationship between two entities is also called “cardinality.”
One-to-many
Let’s look at the relationships with some examples.
The example above shows the relationship of a customer to an order. This is a one-to-many ...