A data model in software engineering is an abstract model, that documents and organizes the business data for communication

between team members and is used as a plan for developing applications, specifically how data is stored and accessed. Database design is the process of producing a detailed data model of a database. A logical data model (LDM) in systems engineering is a representation of an organization's data, organized in terms of entities and relationships and is independent of any particular data management technology. Importance - often diagrammatic in nature and are most typically used in business processes that seek to capture things of importance to an organization and how they relate to one another. Once validated and approved, the logical data model can become the basis of a physical data model and inform the design of a database. conceptual data model -> logical data model -> physical data model difference b/w logical DM and domain model - While the two concepts are closely related, and have overlapping goals, a domain model is more focused on capturing the concepts in the problem domain rather than the structure of the data associated with that domain. Reasons for building a logical data model * Helps common understanding of business data elements and requirements * Provides foundation for designing a database * Facilitates avoidance of data redundancy and thus prevent data & business transaction inconsistency * Facilitates data re-use and sharing * Decreases development and maintenance time and cost * Confirms a logical process model and helps impact analysis. A physical data model (a.k.a. database design) is a representation of a data design which takes into account the facilities and constraints of a given database management system. In the lifecycle of a project it is typically derived from a logical data model, though it may be reverse-engineered from a given database implementation. A complete physical data model will include all the database artifacts required to create relationships between tables or achieve performance goals, such as indexes, constraint definitions,

linking tables, partitioned tables or clusters. The physical data model can usually be used to calculate storage estimates and may include specific storage allocation details for a given database system. differences between logical DM and physical DM: The following tasks are performed in an iterative manner: *Identify entity (collection of similar objects) types (class = data and relationships; entity = only data) *Identify attributes *Apply naming conventions *Identify relationships *Apply data model patterns *Assign keys *Normalize to reduce data redundancy *Denormalize to improve performance The goal of data normalization is to reduce and even eliminate data redundancy, an important consideration for application developers because it is incredibly difficult to stores objects in a relational database that maintains the same information in several places. Adv of data normalization - reduces the possibilty of inconsistent data, highlynormalized data schemas in general are closer conceptually to objectoriented schemas because the object-oriented goals of promoting high cohesion and loose coupling between classes results in similar solutions Disadv of data normalization - performance cost database model - hierarchical, network, relational A hierarchical data model is a data model in which the data is organized into a tree-like structure. The structure allows repeating information using parent/child relationships: each parent can have many children but each child only has one parent (also known as a 1:many ratio ). All attributes of a specific record are listed under an entity type.eg. IMS db Network database model: organizes data using two fundamental constructs, called records and sets. 1 parent -> multiple children; 1 child -> many parents

Relational - The relational model was introduced by E.F. Codd in 1970[1] as a way to make database management systems more independent of any particular application. It is a mathematical model defined in terms of predicate logic and set theory. The products that are generally referred to as relational databases in fact implement a model that is only an approximation to the mathematical model defined by Codd. Three key terms are used extensively in relational database models: relations, attributes, and domains. A relation is a table with columns and rows. The named columns of the relation are called attributes, and the domain is the set of values the attributes are allowed to take. The basic data structure of the relational model is the table, where information about a particular entity (say, an employee) is represented in rows (also called tuples) and columns. Thus, the "relation" in "relational database" refers to the various tables in the database; a relation is a set of tuples. The columns enumerate the various attributes of the entity (the employee's name, address or phone number, for example), and a row is an actual instance of the entity (a specific employee) that is represented by the relation. As a result, each tuple of the employee table represents various attributes of a single employee. All relations (and, thus, tables) in a relational database have to adhere to some basic rules to qualify as relations. First, the ordering of columns is immaterial in a table. Second, there can't be identical tuples or rows in a table. And third, each tuple will contain a single value for each of its attributes. A relational database contains multiple tables, each similar to the one in the "flat" database model. One of the strengths of the relational model is that, in principle, any value occurring in two different records (belonging to the same table or to different tables), implies a relationship among those two records. Yet, in order to enforce explicit integrity constraints, relationships between records in tables can also be defined explicitly, by identifying or nonidentifying parent-child relationships characterized by assigning cardinality (1:1, (0)1:M, M:M). Tables can also have a designated single attribute or a set of attributes that can act as a "key", which can be used to uniquely identify each tuple in the table. A key that can be used to uniquely identify a row in a table is called a primary key. Keys are commonly used to join or combine data from two or more tables. For example, an Employee table may contain a column named Location which contains a value that matches the key of a Location table. Keys are also critical in the creation of indexes, which facilitate fast retrieval of data from large tables. Any column can be a key, or multiple columns can

be grouped together into a compound key. It is not necessary to define all the keys in advance; a column can be used as a key even if it was not originally intended to be one. A key that has an external, real-world meaning (such as a person's name, a book's ISBN, or a car's serial number) is sometimes called a "natural" key. If no natural key is suitable (think of the many people named Brown), an arbitrary or surrogate key can be assigned (such as by giving employees ID numbers). In practice, most databases have both generated and natural keys, because generated keys can be used internally to create links between rows that cannot break, while natural keys can be used, less reliably, for searches and for integration with other databases. (For example, records in two independently developed databases could be matched up by social security number, except when the social security numbers are incorrect, missing, or have changed.)