Lesson 3. Defining Entities and Entity and Referential Integrity

Estimated lesson time: 30 minutes

After you’ve selected your conceptual and logical design and data types (and created them, if you need user-defined data types), it is time to create tables. Designing tools such as Office Visio feature forward engineering, so you can create a database and database objects directly from the tool. However, you can also simply create a script and then move from design to such development tools as Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. Probably the better practice is to move to development tools because they enable version control, development of a whole application rather than just the database part of it, creation of test data and unit test procedures, and more. You should still use design tools for documentation of your application and database. This lesson assumes that you are going to switch from graphical tools to T-SQL code. You will learn how to design and create entities, design entity and referential integrity, and use special types of columns.