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Details of books are stored in a table called : book Book, and this table is related to one called: Author, and another called: Publisher. The Book table stores information about the book, such as title, author, subject and publisher, although the information about the author and the publisher is stored in a separate database table. Here there is a possibility that a book will have more than one author, and an author will have contributed to more than one book, and so we have an intermediate link table defined.

Similarly with the realtionship relationship between publisher and book, we have a relationship which is illustrated by the crow's foot symbol at one end: 

The crow's foot indicates that one end of the relationship has many Entities Image Added One Entity is indicated by the single line out, and the cross at the opposite end of the line. Thus the relationship is indicated by the lines shown, in our example here the Book entity potentially has many authors and the Author entity potentially has (or has written) many books.

This kind of modelling allows the data modeller to build a set of entities in a relational database which ideally mean that data is stored in only one place, which makes for easier data management.

For the purposes of managing a catalogue of books, perhaps as part of a bookstore or library this kind of database is sufficient.

The data model we have illustrated is sufficent for simple data storage, which is what it has been designed for. However for data governance more information needs to be linked to or related to this core data model.

The way we do this is using a metadata registry.