A friendly logical database design tool for the Humming-Bird system

Abstract

The schema descriptions of most database management systems are designed for computer processing, and are not suitable for human understanding; therefore an interface is required between a logical database designer and the schema definition component of a database management system (DBMS). For this reason, a logical data base design tool is designed for a DBMS with a two-level network data structure. The tool consists of a "description mode" and a "translation mode." The "description mode," based on the famous "Entity-Relationship Model,”^2,3,4,5 provides an interactive and friendly interface which allows a user to describe an enterprise view easily. Then, the "translation mode" uses the outputs of the "description mode" as its inputs and translates the descriptions into a "two-level" network database description which is an acceptable database schema of the general purpose DBMS — Humming Bird.