Terminology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) | A way to represent the structure of our program (e.g. business) entities in a way that we can |
| translate into database tables and relationships. | |
| Entities | The first component of an ERD, that is typically represented by the major nouns of our system (e.g. "Keep track of students, the courses the students are taking, and the course's teacher."). |
| Attributes | Characteristics/Properties of each Entity that we want to keep information of in our program, these are singularly named and store a single value (e.g. These would be things like "the student's name", "the student's age", "the student's birthday", "the course's name", "the course's description", and "the teacher's name".). |
| Relationships | How the Entities in our Diagram are connected to each other (e.g. A student is enrolled in a course and a course is taught by a teacher.). |
| Relational Database | Represents the data in a tabular form of rows and columns. Each column in a table represents an Attribute of the Entity. Each row in a table represents a record, the data associated with an Entity. |