Author: Jeffrey Edison

Over the past 25 years, Jeffrey has worked in various roles in financial services software, with a focus on transaction banking and automation with artificial intelligence methods. He has extensive knowledge and expertise in financial payments, combating financial crime, and virtual account management. His experience spans various disciplines ranging from architecture and design to product management and sales.

How to Design an ER Diagram for an Invoice Management System

Do you need to create an ER diagram for an invoice management system? Maybe you’re just curious about how the process would work. We are here to help. So, let's get started on creating the model for your invoice management database. To begin, we will create an entity-relationship diagram (ER diagram or ERD), which is a model of the database that represents the information to be stored by the invoice management system.

How Do You Design an ER Diagram for an Employee Database?

Do you need to create an entity-relationship model for an employee database? Or are you looking for a database design for an employee management system? Maybe you’re just curious about how the process would work. You've come to the right place. In this article, we’ll explain how to develop ER diagrams for an employee database. We’ll start with the logical model and move to the physical model (which is designed for a specific database management system (DBMS), such as Oracle, MySQL, etc.

How to Draw an Entity-Relationship Diagram

Curious about how to create an ER diagram (entity-relationship diagram or ERD) during the database design phase? We’ll explain how to understand and create ER diagrams and explore what ERD/database modeling tools can make the process quicker and easier. An entity-relationship diagram can be considered the blueprint of a database. We use entity-relationship diagrams when we are modeling data stored (or that will be stored) in a database. ER diagrams allow discussions of requirements, such as what information needs to be stored, what aspects of the information need to be secured, and how the information is linked together.

6 Tips for Modeling a Legacy Database

Do you need to manage an existing database, but without a proper model of the entities and relationships? We're here to help. This article will explain the why, what, and how of modeling an existing database. Typically, in IT, we think that "legacy" is bad. In actual fact, legacy is often a way of life. Most organizations are not working with entirely new "greenfield" development. (Except in the world of startups.

Beverly Hills 90210 and ZIP+4: Handling Addresses in Data Models

In my last post, I wrote about ensuring that your data model properly handles global information: numbers, currencies, phone numbers, addresses, dates, and time zones, among other things. However, I’ve realized that many example data models have exactly the “self-centric” or “Amero-centric” approach that I cautioned against. As an American living abroad (for almost 30 years now), I often find that people make too many assumptions about the universality of what they know.

7 Key Things to Remember About Data Model Globalization

Very few database authors mention the challenges of globalization and localization in any meaningful way. There’s a similar lack of foresight from database architects. The fact is that many authors and designers are frequently very ‘self-centric’: they create (or write about) data models that only properly handle their local time zones, addresses, etc. A self-centric approach has a big problem: the resulting model will only support local data. In today’s Internet-fueled world, applications are often unexpectedly accessed by users around the globe.

13 Blog Articles on Database Design Best Practices and Tips

There’s a lot to keep in mind when you’re designing a database, and very few of us can remember every valuable tip and trick we’ve learned. So, let’s take a look at some online resources that feature database design tips and best practices. As we go, I’ll share my own opinions on the ideas presented, based on my experience in database design. Obviously, this article is not an exhaustive list, but I’ve tried to review and comment on a cross section of sources.

19 Online Resources for Learning About Database Design Errors

We all make mistakes, and we can all learn from other people’s mistakes. In this post, we’ll take a look at numerous online resources for avoiding poor database design that can lead to many problems and cost both time and money. And in an upcoming article, we’ll tell you where to find tips and best practices. Database Design Errors and Mistakes to Avoid There are numerous online resources to help database designers avoid common errors and mistakes.

Naming Conventions in Database Modeling

What’s In A Name? The Database Edition Database models require that objects be named. While several facets of naming an object deserve consideration, in this article we’ll focus on the most important one: defining a convention and sticking to it. Why Use Naming Conventions? Look at the database model below. I went a bit overboard and removed as many traces of a naming convention as I could. This proves my first point: a naming convention is an important part of a well-built data model.

Tips for Better Database Design

Over the years, working as a data modeler and database architect, I have noticed that there are a couple rules that should be followed during data modeling and development. Here I describe some tips in the hope that they might help you. I have listed the tips in the order that they occur during the project lifecycle rather than listing them by importance or by how common they are.

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