Incorporating business requirements and constraints in database conceptual models

Abstract

Entity relationship (ER) approach is predominantly used for conceptual modelling of database systems in terms of entities and their relationships. The approach does not provide sufficient support for incorporating business constraints and their impact on the entity relationships, thus leaving a gap between the requirements elicitation and database implementation. This paper makes an attempt to bridge this gap by proposing a construct that would enable the system architects to illustrate business requirements and constraints at the conceptual model with minimal effort. To do this, we have proposed an approach called attribute-oriented business requirements and constraints (BRCs). We classify five different categories of attribute-oriented BRCs for binary relationships. Based on this approach, we propose a construct to enhance the modelling capabilities and expressiveness of the ER approach without introducing any conflict with the current features. Our main contribution in this paper is a new construct to specify the business rules and constraints along with the systems requirements in database conceptual modelling.