chapter four

4 Entities and attributes

 

In this chapter

  • You start the design and analysis phase in database design.
  • You learn about keys and common data types in databases.
  • You design your first few entities, identifying their attributes, primary keys, and data types of attributes.
What you need to know

You can find the database design covered in this chapter (so far it’s only entities and attributes) implemented in two tools commonly used by practitioners, dbdiagram.io and Workbench in the chapter_04 folder in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/Neo-Hao/grokking-relational-database-design). You can follow the instructions in the README.md file to load the database design into dbdiagram.io or Workbench.

4.1 Overview

In Chapter 3, you walked through an overview of the database design process, and went over the requirements gathering phase for the online store of The Sci-Fi Collective.

Starting from this chapter, you will move to the next database design phase, design and analysis. The first step of design and analysis is data modeling, which aims to generate an entity-relationship (E-R) diagram. In this chapter, you will focus on designing all the required entities for the database of The Sci-Fi Collective online store. By doing so, you will learn about entities, attributes, keys, and data types.

4.2 Entities and attributes

4.3 Keys

4.4 Data types

4.4.1 String data types: power of personality

4.4.2 Integers: numbering your way to success

4.4.3 Float like a butterfly, decimal like a data queen

4.4.4 Temporal Data Types: Time Flies When You're Querying

4.5 Summary