ER/Studio - Embarcadero Technologies Product Documentation

GLOSSARY
M
Macro: Code written in the Sax BASIC language that can be used to retrieve or write information about objects.
Materialized View: Materialized views are used to dynamically copy data between distributed databases. There are
two types of materialized views:
• Complex
• Simple
Complex materialized views copy part of a master table or data from more than one master table. Simple materialized
views directly copy a single table. You cannot directly update the underlying data contained in materialized views.
Metadata: All the information about a data warehouse that is not the actual stored data itself. Metadata describes the
structure and relationship of data.
Metamodel: A model about models. A metamodel describes the underlying structure of a model.
Migration: The process by which a parent entity contributes foreign keys to a child entity.
Model: Representation of the logical or physical design of a database.
N
Node: Diagram auto-layout term. Refers to a box on the model representing an entity or a view.
Node Groups: A named subset of one or more database partitions.
Non-Identifying Relationship: A type of relationship in which the primary key of the parent entity is inherited by
the child entity as non-key attributes.
Non-Key Attribute: An attribute that does not participate in an entity’s primary key.
Non-Specific Relationship: A type of relationship that implies a many-to-many relationship between two entities.
Because many-to-many relationships cannot be logically resolved, non-specific relationships are used for notational
purposes and do not result in any foreign key migration.
Normalization: The process of removing inaccurate, inconsistent, redundant and/or overly complex assertions in a
data model.
Not Null: The state of always having a value.
Null: The state of having no value.
O
Object Type: An abstract data type or object composed of a collection of similar types of data.
EMBARCADERO TECHNOLOGIES > ER/STUDIO® 8.0.3 USER GUIDE 413