1. Introduction
When you begin to design any database, you probably start off by writing a list of the attributes which will be in each table.
For example in a customer table you might want the following attributes:
- Customer ID
- Title
- Forename
- Surname
- Address line 1
- Address line 2
- Town
- County
- Postcode
- Telephone number
There are many different ways that you could write this list down. You could do it as a bullet pointed list as above. You could write them in a single line, one entity after another, e.g. customer ID, title, forename etc. You could even write them down as a spider diagram.
Whilst you understand your own table design, this is not the correct way of presenting a data structure.
See the next page for the correct method of writing down the data structure of tables in a database.