Shifting Away From Tables To Entity Models
RDBMS relational data management systems, simply put, most Database systems allow us to create data models of businesses in terms of rows and columns in a table. Tables can be 'related' to indicate dependencies of data between tables. RDBMS was on the best things that ever happened to software abstractions. Every business domain has been modeled to be a set of tables and relations between them. However, recently another paradigm is taking shape (at least, I only noticed it in the last year), called as Domain Driven Development, DDD for short, that emphasizes the importance of modeling a business in the domain of the business itself rather than dictated by abstractions tied to tables. DDD clout calls them "Entities" (not Tables). In certain ways, I read this shift from RDBMS to Entity model as "shift from horizontal (table) abstractions to hierarchical (entity) abstractions". While Entity models may provide a better modeling, in a well designed database mo...