Now that you have decided on a direction for your Term Project, you can now start with an initial design. Structural business rules and a conceptual entity-relationship diagram (ERD) are a useful tool to frame your initial design. You will be providing both in this Term Project iteration.

Let us review the basics of both of these items. The structural business rules will indicate the entities, relationships, optionalities, and pluralities of your Term Project design. For example, “A person may own many cars; a car is owned by one person” is an example of a structural business rule. A conceptual ERD is independent of the relational model, and therefore does not contain primary and foreign key constraints.

Make sure that all business …show more content…

The conceptual ERD and your set of structural business rules must match exactly. Concepts Assignment 2 had you do this for two scenarios. The purpose of the business rules is to help you define your schema and ultimately your database. Your list of structural business rules do not need to identify attributes or other types of database constraints, but if you choose to include these types of business rules make sure you have the structural ones defined too. I would suggest grouping your structural rules together in your list by relationship. Let me know if you have any questions.

Here is a good example of a pair of structural business rules that would likely exist in your project. Keep in mind that it is just an example and your rules for this relationship pair (including chosen entity names) can vary depending on how you decide to design your database. You would continue this pattern of creating structural business rules for every entity relationship you have in your schema.

Example business rule: A queue has one or more movies. A movie may exist in one or more queue.

This is a great start to your conceptual ERD as far as the entities you have represented and the relationships between them, but it is really more of a logical ERD instead of a conceptual one. Conceptual ERDs are not expected to have any attributes listed or keys defined. This diagram should be similar to what was required for Concepts Assignment 2. There is