Key concepts that a business analyst should understand about data modeling include the following:

• Entity (or class): An entity (sometimes referred to as a class) represents the element of a database that information is stored in. It is most commonly a person or a thing that the organization wants to store information about. 

Some examples of entities are an employee, customer, product, or order name.

• Attribute: An attribute is a piece of information that describes an entity. 

Some examples of attributes are a first name, last name, order number, date, or amount of something.

• Relationships (or associations): A relationship shows whether two entities relate to each other and what their relationship is. 

An example of a relationship is an entity called Employee is related to another entity called Salary. The nature of this relationship can be that each Employee entity in a database has one-to-many Salary records.

• Diagrams: When you create a data model diagram, you show the entities and attributes and their relationship on the diagram. You should also show the nature of the relationships on the diagram. This is referred to as cardinality.
• Metadata: In cases where more detail is included, you can also show metadata on your model. This type of information shows why an entity is created, how it is used, how often it is used, when it is used, and who it is used by.
  

Some examples of metadata are privacy setting, the creation date, and the date something should be updated by.