0

I am in dire need of help on how to explain what a data dictionary record is... I've been on Google all night and couldn't find a thing.

From a few investigations I was able to find some information, which is below, but i don't know how to link them up nor find the correlation between them. The Topic I'm focusing on is DATA DICTIONARY.

What are data dictionary records?..

  • Entity entries
  • entity attributes entries
  • dataflows entries
  • process entries

Thanks for your concern.

Bill Karwin
  • 538,548
  • 86
  • 673
  • 828
Selase
  • 175
  • 5
  • 24
  • 8
    10 questions and 0 accepted answers? – Mark Elliot Jan 13 '10 at 22:45
  • whats that supposed to mean? 10 Quest and 0 accepted ans? do i get to choose which is the accepted ans? – Selase Jan 14 '10 at 05:38
  • Also, please try to explain what you need to know. Your question is unclear. I have had a guess at understanding your question but obviously I guessed wrong. – APC Jan 14 '10 at 07:06

2 Answers2

2

The data dictionary holds meta-data for the database. That is, it stores the data which describes the database objects. So when we want to know what tables are defined in the database we query the data dictionary. When we want to know whether a table has any indexes we query the data dictionary.

You can find more details in the ever-reliable Wikipedia.

APC
  • 144,005
  • 19
  • 170
  • 281
  • Been to Wiki but couldnt find anything in relation to it. read almost everything about data dictionary but still no clue. may be i dont understand the question. could that be? – Selase Jan 14 '10 at 05:37
0

A Data Dictionary is a documentation of your data (metadata) - structure and a description of tables and columns, relations and constraints. It helps anyone who wants to work with databases find and understand data. Without a proper Data Dictionary, you will need to depend on the knowledge of people who know the databases or sentence yourself to do a lot of digging through the code of applications, reports, queries, many hours of guesswork and errors. It's really easier and cheaper to do a little documenting.

Tomasz Wasiewicz
  • 1
  • 1