1. Discuss the importance of data models.
2. What is a business rule, and what is its purpose in data modeling?
3. How do you translate business rules into data model components?
4. Describe the basic features of the relational data model and discuss their importance to the end user and the designer.
5. Explain how the entity relationship (ER) model helped produce a more structured relational database design environment.
6. Consider the scenario described by the statement "A customer can make many payments, but each payment is made by only one customer." Use this scenario as the basis for an entity relationship diagram (ERD) representation.
7. Why is an object said to have greater semantic content than an entity?
8. What is the difference between an object and a class in the object-oriented data model (OODM)?
9. How would you model Question 6 with an OODM? (Use Figure 2.4 as your guide.)
10. What is an ERDM, and what role does it play in the modern (production) database environment?
11. What is a relationship, and what three types of relationships exist?
12. Give an example of each of the three types of relationships.
13. What is a table, and what role does it play in the relational model?
14. What is a relational diagram? Give an example.
15. What is connectivity? (Use a Crow's Foot ERD to illustrate connectivity.)
16. Describe the Big Data phenomenon.
17. What does the term 3 Vs refer to?
18. What is Hadoop, and what are its basic components?
19. What are the basic characteristics of a NoSQL database?
20. Using the example of a medical clinic with patients and tests, provide a simple representation of how to model this example using the relational model and how it would be represented using the key-value data modeling technique.
21. What is logical independence?
22. What is physical independence?