Database Management
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When involved in a business or even a business project, there are 3 major rules that are created to affect the way your business works. Usually, these are rules that involve employees or staff and are rules that specify what they can and cannot do. A great example of a business rule involves marriages. For many companies, a manager is not allowed to marry an employee or an accountant at a company is usually not allowed to marry another accountant. In this case, the accountants are not allowed to be married because there is a more likely chance that the spouses can change financial information and then cover for one another. These rules are intended to prevent disruption in a company or business.

Business Rules are used every day to define entities, attributes, and relationships. Usually though they are used for the organization that stores or uses data to be an explanation of a policy, procedure, or principle. The data can be considered significant only after business rules are defined, without them it’s just records, but to a business they are the characteristics that are defined and seen by the company. Business Rules help employees focus on and implement the actions within the organizations environment. Some things to think about when creating business rules are to keep them simple, easy to understand, keep them broad so that everyone can have a similar interpretation. To be considered true, business rules must be in writing and kept up to date.

Identifying Business Rules


Identifying and documenting business rules are very important to the database design. Business rules allow the creator to develop relationship participation rules and constraints and to create a correct data model. They also allow the creators to understand business processes, and the nature, role and scope of the data. They are a communication tool between users and creators, and they also help standardize the company’s view of the data. It is important to keep in mind that some business rules cannot be modeled. Business Rules give the proper classification of entities, attributes, and relationships. Sources of business rules are managers, policy makers, department managers, written documentation, procedures, standards, operation manuals, and interviews with end users. Our textbook describes that as a general user the noun in a Business Rule will translate into an entity in the model and a verb (active or passive) associating nouns will translate into a relationship among the entities. Consider that business rules are bidirectional. The textbook also mentions that there are two questions to ask to properly identify Business Rules, how many instances of B are related to one instance of A? How many instances of A are related to one instance of B?


Some examples of business rules:


Departments ------offers---------Course



Course----------generates---------Class


Professor ->->->->->teaches->->->->->Class


There are several protocols to the way business rules are written. Not every protocol has to be followed, but in general, a well-written set of business rules consist of having a unique identifier, describes one and only one concept, are written in plain language, are written, and are from a single source. In terms of a unique identifier, business rules should come with an identifier that may consist of the rule number and the department it affects. And example would be ‘BRacc01’. In this case, this business rule (BR) is directly related to the accounting department.

Another important aspect of business rules consist of how the rules are shared within the company. A protocol for business rules that many follow is that the business rules are written down. However, with many businesses sharing information directly over the internet, some are opting to place their business rules online in company blogs, wikis, and websites. This shares the business rules with all employees faster and easier. In relation to how business rules are read, it is very important that business rules are written in plain language. If business rules are written at a high level language, there is an increased chance that not every person will understand what the business rules cover or what is acceptable and what is not.

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