JCK - A Veteran-Owned Small Business		 EXCELLENCE IN DATA ARCHITECTURE

since 1989

America Support You		 4348 Pine Grove Ave
Fort Gratiot MI USA
48059-3732
V: 810 982-8639
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The Weakest Link in Business

Data Structure and User Reality

Business Events and Mathematical Modeling



What is User Focused Data Architecture? 		Strictly speaking, any relationship of any type in a normalized model can be constructed as a new table. This only must be done with M:M relationships, but even 1:1 and 1:M relationships could be modeled that way. Thus we could have modeled the relationships in the above model in this manner:



Why aren't they? Because there's no need. Since the Employee entity provides an unduplicated list of EmpNums, there's no need to make a new table – you can just "overlay" the "relationship table" onto the entity, making the EmpNum primary key serve several purposes and using the relation columns to indicate the related data. Conceptually, you're doing this:
 

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Since 1989, JCK has been devoted to teaching and implementing the principles of User-Focused Data Architecture. UFDA is based on the principle that the users are the data experts in any organization. Sound data architecture should focus on extracting the user's knowledge, clarifying ambiguous defintions, and building understandable data structures. These definitions and structures serve as the basis for system development. The first and most well known UFDA technique is Extended Relational Analysis ™ (ERA), which has been proven for decades. More recent techniques include Business Event Analysis & Modeling ™ (BEAM), which is useful for both Transactional Systems (BEAM TSS) and Decision Support Systems (BEAM DSS).