Developing Database Systems

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on what is likely to be the most common and demanded application of conceptual modelling: that of the development of database systems. We start by introducing databases for those who are not familiar with them and especially relational databases. We introduce the notions of tables, columns, rows, primary keys, foreign keys and relationships and provide some examples of how a simple relational database works. Then, we provide a comprehensive list of mapping guidelines that can be used to construct a relational database from a conceptual model. Ten different mapping guidelines are provided, to implement enumerated types and items, classes and attributes, specialization hierarchies and associations. Finally, a worked example is provided to illustrate how a relational database is constructed from a simple type model.