AIS Chapter 7 Key terms for Accounting Info Systems chapter 7 Essay

Term	Definition
Agent (REA Model)	The “who” associated with events.
Attributes	The characteristics that describe entities.
Big data	Data that are of such great volume that they cannot be captured, stored, and analyzed by traditional databases and existing hardware.
Business event (REA Model)	Do not affect financial statements, but may affect important aspects of an organization.
Cardinalities	Describe how entities are related.
Concurrency controls	Make is possible to for two or more users to access the same record from the same table at the same time.
Data dictionary	Describes the data fields in each database record.
Data field	Information that describes a person, event, or thing in the database.
Data hierarchy	Organizing data into a logical structure (data field, record, file, database).
Data integrity controls	Designed by the database developers and are customized for different applications.
Data modeling	Process used to design the database.
Database	A large collection of organized data that can be accessed by multiple users and used by many different computer applications.
Database administrator	Supervises the design, development, and installation of a large database system and is also the person responsible for maintaining, securing, and changing the database.
Database management system	Specialized software packages that manipulate data in databases.
Economic event (REA Model)	Typically affect the company’s financial statements.
Entity (REA Model)	Data about objects of interest.
Entity-relationship diagram	Graphical depiction of entities and their relationships.
First normal form (1NF)	The form a database is in if all of a single records attributes are singular.
Foreign keys	Enable accounting records to reference one or more records in other tables.
Master file	Typically store permanent information.
Metadata	Data about data.
Normalization	A methodology for ensuring that attributes are stored in the most appropriate tables and that the design of the database promotes accurate and nonredundant storage of data.
Primary key	The data field in each record that uniquely distinguishes one record from another in a database table.
REA model	Very effective model for designing databases to be used in accounting systems.
Record	Stores all of the information. Also called a tuple.
Record structure	The specific data fields in each record of a database table.
Relational database	Groups of related, two-dimensional tables.
Relationship table	Tables necessary when you have many-to-many relationship.
Resources (REA model)	Used, transferred, or generated by events.
Second normal form (2NF)	The form a database is in if it is in first normal form and all the attributes in each record depend entirely on the record’s primary key.
Third normal form (3NF)	The form a database is in if it is in second normal form and contains no transitive dependencies.
Transaction controls	Ensure that the database system performs each transaction accurately and completely.
Transaction files	Typically store transient information.
Transitive dependencies	The same record does not contain any data fields where data field A determines data field B.
View controls	Limit each users access to information on a need-to-know basis.

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