GBDS key terms

A written statement of what the business needs a solution to accomplish, expressed in business language and independent of any particular technology or vendor product.

A description of a specific behavior the system must perform, such as calculating a value or rejecting an invalid entry, usually testable and traceable to a business need.

A structured narrative of how an actor interacts with a system to achieve a goal, including preconditions, main flow, alternate flows, and postconditions.

A diagram showing processes, data stores, external entities, and the direction of data movement among them, used to analyze how information moves through a business process.

A table linking each requirement to its source, design elements, and test cases so that coverage and impact of change can be verified.

A model depicting entities, their attributes, and the relationships among them, typically with cardinality and optionality shown, used to design a database structure.

An attribute or minimal set of attributes whose values uniquely identify each row in a table and may not be null.

An attribute or set of attributes in one table whose values must match a primary key or unique key value in another table, enforcing referential integrity between the two.

Any attribute or minimal combination of attributes that could serve as a primary key because it uniquely identifies each row; one is chosen and the rest become alternate keys.

A system-generated identifier with no business meaning, assigned to a row to provide a stable, compact key that is independent of changing natural business identifiers.

An identifier drawn from real-world business data, such as a tax number or product code, used to uniquely identify an entity.

The number of occurrences of one entity that may be associated with an occurrence of another, commonly expressed as one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.

The process of organizing attributes into tables to reduce redundancy and avoid update anomalies, progressing through forms such as first, second, and third normal form.

Deliberately introducing redundancy into a designed schema, often to reduce join complexity and improve query performance in reporting or analytical workloads.

A dimensional design with a central fact table of measures and keys surrounded by denormalized dimension tables that describe the business entities.

A dimensional design in which dimension tables are normalized into related sub-dimensions, reducing redundancy at the cost of additional joins.

A constraint ensuring that a foreign key value either matches an existing parent key value or is null, preventing orphaned rows.

A rule declared on a table or column, such as primary key, unique, check, or not null, that the database enforces on all data changes.

A unit of work that must complete entirely or not at all, preserving atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability properties.

The four guarantees of reliable transaction processing: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.

A setting that controls how much a transaction is shielded from the uncommitted or concurrent changes of other transactions, trading consistency against concurrency.

A physical structure maintained by the database to speed retrieval of rows matching a search condition, at the cost of storage space and slower writes.

The access path chosen by the optimizer for a SQL statement, showing operations such as scans, joins, and sorts and their estimated costs.

The systematic analysis of data to reveal patterns such as null rates, distinct value counts, ranges, and format conformity before or during a project.

A measurable characteristic used to judge fitness of data, for example completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness, uniqueness, and validity.

The process of detecting and correcting or removing inaccurate, incomplete, duplicated, or malformed records so that data meets defined quality rules.

A person accountable for the quality, definition, and appropriate use of a specific data domain on behalf of the organization.

The decision rights and accountability framework that defines who may make decisions about data, how standards are set, and how compliance is monitored.

A record of the origin and movement of data from source systems through transformations to final reports, supporting impact analysis and audit.

A security model in which permissions are granted to roles rather than individuals, and users receive access by being assigned to roles.

The principle that each user or process receives only the minimum access rights needed to perform its function, and no more.

A data integration pattern that pulls data from sources, applies cleansing and transformation rules, and writes the results into a target store.

A data integration pattern that loads raw source data into a target platform first and performs transformations there, using the target engine's compute.

A specification listing each target column, its source columns, transformation logic, data types, and default or error handling rules.

A technique that identifies and delivers only rows inserted, updated, or deleted since a prior point, reducing load on sources and targets.

The practice of combining data from multiple sources into a unified, consistent view for operational or analytical use.

A dimension design pattern for tracking attribute history over time, commonly by overwriting values, adding new rows, or keeping prior and current versions.

A subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant store of data assembled from multiple sources to support querying, reporting, and analysis rather than daily transactions.

A multidimensional approach to querying summarized data, supporting operations such as slicing, dicing, drilling down, and rolling up.

A quantified measure tied to a business objective, with an agreed definition, target, and reporting frequency, used to judge performance.

The collection of practices, tools, and technologies used to turn stored data into information that supports management decisions.

A defined, consistently calculated measure such as revenue or average order value, with specified formula, grain, and filters.

Uncontrolled expansion of project scope through small, unapproved additions that erode schedule and budget without formal change control.

A formal process for proposing, assessing, approving, and recording changes to baselined scope, schedule, or requirements.

A hierarchical decomposition of the total project work into manageable deliverables and tasks used for estimating, scheduling, and assignment.

The longest sequence of dependent activities through a project schedule, which determines the earliest possible completion date.