Understand what company/client wants. Should correlate to what was found in SDLC.

Database system specifications - objectives, scope, boundaries

Concentrate on Data. Build a model of real world. Focus on the interaction with this model. Has 2 main views - business and designer. Take all aspects and bring to down to a database. Make sure to answer critical questions.

Stage is crucial to understand what is actually going to happen now that it is up and running. Modifications will occur.

When database goes online, where you can find out how things are actually perceived and how they work.

Basically the database is living so it needs to grow, in this stage performance is at the centre. Constant manipulation in order to make sure system is always running efficiently.

Need to load data. Performance Is key in this stage. Normalizations causes splitting, performance is key. Must take into consideration other factors like security, backup and recovery, integrity as well as the company standards.

Maintenance (preventative, corrective/recovery, adaptive), access permissions, statistics, security audits and summaries.

Bottom - Up: Identifies data elements (items), groups them together in data sets. Attribute to Entity

Top - Down: identifies data sets, defines data elements for each of those sets. Entity to Attribute