Data management

• Without data and the ability to process it, an organization would not be able to successfully complete most business activities.
• For example it would not be able to pay employees, send out bills and order new inventory.
• Data is organized in following hierarchy
1. bit
2. byte
3. character
4. field
5. record
6. file
7. database
• Entities, Attributes and Keys
• an entity is generalized class of people, places or things(objects). Example include employees, inventory and customers.
• an attribute is a characteristic of an entity. For example, employee number, last name, first name and hire date.
• a key is a field or set of fields that identifies a record
• A primary key uniquely identifies a record.