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Data & Analytics · Foundational

Entity

A person, place, thing, event or concept about which data is stored; it usually becomes a table.

Definition

In data modeling, an entity type such as Customer has instances (individual customers) described by attributes. Strong entities have their own identifiers. Weak entities depend on a parent entity for identification.

Example

Customer, Product and Invoice are entities in a sales model.

Exam tip

Entities are nouns; relationships are usually verbs, such as 'Customer places Order'.

Related terms