A business rule is a brief, precise

A business rule is a brief, precise, and unambigous description of a policy, procedure, or principle within a specific organization's environment. In a sense, business rules are misnamed: they apply to any organization -- a business, a government unit, a religious group, or a research laboratory; large or small -- that stores and uses data to generate information.

Business rules are derived from a description of operations. As its name implies, a description of operations is a detailed narrative that describes the operational environment of an organization. Such a description requires great precision and detail. If the description of operations is incorrect or inomplete, the business rules derived from it will not reflect the real world data environment accurately, thus leading to poorly defined data models, which lead to poor database designs. In turn, poor database designs lead to poor applications, thus setting the stage for poor decision making - which may ultimately lead to the demise of the organization.

Properly written business rules are used to define entities, attributes, relationships, and constraints. Because these components form the basis for a database design, the careful derivation and definition of business rules is crucial to good database design.

A data model is a relatively simple representation, usually graphical, of a more complex real world object event. The data model's main function is to help us understand the complexities of the real-world environment. The database designer uses data models to facilitate the interaction among designers, application programmers, and end users. In short, a good data model is a communications device that helps eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) discrepancies between the database design's components and the real world data environment. The development of data models, bolstered by powerful database design tools, has made it possible to substantially diminish the database design error potential.