On an ERD, you see a line between "Order" and "Product" with a "Crow's Foot" on both ends. What is the BA's next step?

Resolve the Many-to-Many relationship by creating an "Associative Entity" (e.g., Order_Items)

Explanation

 

When a Business Analyst (BA) encounters this specific visual, they are looking at a Logical Design Flaw. Relational databases cannot store this structure because:

1. Placement of Attributes: If you want to record the "Quantity" of a product purchased, you cannot put it in the Order table (because an order has many products) and you cannot put it in the Product table (because a product has many orders). The data has no "home."

2. Implementation: Tables cannot have "lists" of IDs in a single cell.

The BA’s next step involves moving from this Conceptual view to a Physical or Normalized view by identifying what information is missing to bridge these two boxes.