3
You know things are wrong when…
•You have a Customer table with an attribute called ‘LastName’! •You have a Contact table with an attribute called ‘LastName’! •You have a Member table with an attribute called ‘LastName’!
•And so on…
•The Customer is just one example and probably the most visible and ubiquitous one. We’ll be talking about others later.
•BTW - Also, later we’ll discuss different entity classification types and their problems.
•Every organization for which my responsibility was to understand, analyze, fix, model – whatever, the structures, suffered this problem.
•I see it in the data infrastructure of large commercial software. In some cases it’s appropriate for small shrink-wrapped solutions – but it’s inappropriate for large-scale enterprise-wide solutions (which, I understand also suffer from this).