Scope

When setting up a database, you need to know and understand the data you are going to store. You also need to decide on what data is relevant to you and what you are not going to store. You can perform an entity analysis to both define what is relevant to you and understand which parts of the data are relevant. Entity analysis also provides you with an insight as to how complex your data is, which provides you with crucial insights into the risks and timings of your project.

Entity analysis is a top-down approach that provides an initial, high-level view of what our database will look like. Lots of details about the database and the data to be stored will be missing. Along with these details, a lot of the complexity will still be missing. But performing entity analysis enables us to learn about the intended database. We will get a feel for what should and should not be a part of the database. We might even still need to get a first impression of how complex the project at...