Database research and practice has brought up a large body of knowledge and experience. This experience and knowledge is based on solutions for database structures that occur and reoccur in many applications in a similar form. We may distinguish two classes of such solutions: reference models that can be used as a blueprint for a fully fledged schema and stereotypes that are general solutions.

Pattern research considers structures at various levels of detail and is often limited to small schemata. Moreover, the abstraction level varies. We thus need a systematisation. This paper introduces stereotypes as general solutions to problems in a certain context, pattern as classes of refinements of such stereotypes, and templates as technology dependent solutions to problems in the given context.

We develop a general methodology and a number of techniques for stereotypes, pattern and templates. The paper considers structuring which is typically the starting point for development of database systems.