A family is an organizational unit that helps classify data in the database. Meridium Enterprise APM uses two types of families:
Entity family: An organizational unit that is used for classifying elements within your organization. Records belonging to entity families store information that is related to physical items (equipment, people, analyses, inspections, etc.) in your company or facility. For example, Full Inspection is an entity family that Meridium Enterprise APM provides in the baseline database. An individual Full Inspection would be one entity belonging to that family.
Relationship family: Corresponds to a database table that is used to connect two entity family tables. Relationship definitions can be defined for each relationship family to specify the entity families to which it relates. When two entity families have been related to one another through a relationship family, records within those entity families can be linked, meaning that a connection can be created between the two records.
Each family has a corresponding table in the database. Family tables are used to store all the data belonging to a given family, where each row in a family table corresponds to a record in that family.
Meridium Enterprise APM provides many families, both entity families and relationship families, in the baseline Meridium Enterprise APM database. In addition, you can create your own families. The power behind families is in their flexibility. You can create as many families as you need to categorize all of your records. In addition, you can assign families whatever names are appropriate for classifying the type of data that they will store for your organization.
