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Fri, Nov 5, 9:00 - 9:25, Vanderbilt Room     Paper (refereed)
Recommended Citation: Kline, D M and C Riggle.  A Macro Approach to Relational Database Modeling.  In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2004, v 21 (Newport): §2124. ISSN: 1542-7382. (A later version appears in Information Systems Education Journal 3(35). ISSN: 1545-679X.)
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A Macro Approach to Relational Database Modeling

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Refereed7 pages
Douglas M. Kline    [a1] [a2]
Information Systems and Operations Management
University of North Carolina Wilmington    [u1] [u2]
Wilmington, North Carolina, USA    [c1] [c2]

Charlene Riggle    [a1] [a2]
Information Systems and Decision Sciences
University of South Florida    [u1] [u2]
Sarasota, Florida, USA    [c1] [c2]

A new data modeling process is presented that addresses some of the weaknesses of the traditional normalization-driven modeling process. Current approaches generally begin with forms or reports for a particular system as rough entities, then taking these entities through a normalization process, inspecting attribute functional dependencies. The proposed approach is entity-oriented, focusing more on fully developing the data entities and their relationships than on scrutinizing functional dependencies among attributes. We argue that this macro approach should result in more communicative models that are more flexible, being less specific to particular applications. We end with a discussion of other topics that arise in relational data modeling.

Keywords: data modeling, relational model, modeling processes

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