ER Diagrams

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952333/

•Reference: Database System Concepts – 7th Edition,

 ▪ Initial phase -- characterize fully the data needs of the prospective database
users.
▪ Second phase -- choosing a data model
• Applying the concepts of the chosen data model
• Translating these requirements into a conceptual schema of the
Design database.
Phases
• A fully developed conceptual schema indicates the functional
requirements of the enterprise.
▪ Describe the kinds of operations (or transactions) that will be
performed on the data.

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 ▪ Final Phase -- Moving from an abstract data model to the implementation
of the database
▪ Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.
▪ Database design requires that we find a “good” collection of relation
schemas.
Design ▪ Business decision – What attributes should we record in the database?
Phases
▪ Computer Science decision – What relation schemas should we have and
how should the attributes be distributed among the various relation
schemas?
▪ Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of the database.

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 ▪ Major pitfalls:
▪ Redundancy: a bad design may result in repeat information.
▪ Redundant representation of information may lead to data inconsistency
among the various copies of information
▪ Incompleteness: a bad design may make certain aspects of the enterprise
Design difficult or impossible to model.
Alternatives

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 Entity-Relationship data modelling technique

▪ The ER data model employs three basic concepts:

▪ entity sets,
▪ relationship sets,
▪ attributes.
Design ▪ The ER model also has an associated diagrammatic representation, the ER
Alternatives diagram.

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 ▪ An entity is an object that exists and is distinguishable from other objects.
• Example: specific person, company, event, plant
▪ An entity set is a set of entities of the same type that share the same
properties.
• Example: set of all persons, companies, trees, holidays
Entity Sets ▪ An entity is represented by a set of attributes; i.e., descriptive properties
possessed by all members of an entity set.
• Example:
instructor = (ID, name, salary )
course= (course_id, title, credits)
▪ A subset of the attributes form a primary key of the entity set; i.e.,
uniquely identifying each member of the set.

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 Entity sets can be represented graphically as follows:
• Rectangles represent entity sets.
• Attributes listed inside entity rectangle
• Underline indicates primary key attributes
Representin
g ER
Diagrams

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 ▪ A relationship is an association among several entities
Example:
44553 (Peltier) advisor 22222 (Einstein)
student entity relationship set instructor entity

Relationship
Sets ▪ A relationship set is a mathematical relation among n ≥ 2 entities, each
taken from entity sets
{(e1, e2, … en) | e1 ∈ E1, e2 ∈ E2, …, en ∈ En}

where (e1, e2, …, en) is a relationship

• Example:
(44553,22222) ∈ advisor

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 ▪ Example: we define the relationship set advisor to denote the associations
between students and the instructors who act as their advisors.

Relationship
Sets
(Example)

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Relationship
via ER
Diagram

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Relationship
sets with
Attributes

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 Degree of a
Relationship
(e.g., Ternary)

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 Attribute types:

Simple and composite attributes.

Single-valued and multivalued attributes

Example: multivalued attribute: phone_numbers

Attribute
Derived attributes
Types
Can be computed from other attributes

Example: age, given date_of_birth

Domain – the set of permitted values for each attribute

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 ▪ Express the number of entities to which another entity can be associated
via a relationship set.

▪ Most useful in describing binary relationship sets.

▪ For a binary relationship set the mapping cardinality must be one of the

Cardinality following types:

Constraints • One to one

• One to many

• Many to one

• Many to many

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 Mapping
Cardinalities

One to one One to many

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 Mapping
Cardinalities

Many to one Many to many

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One to One
Relationship

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One to Many
Relationship

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 • an instructor is associated with at most one student via advisor,
• and a student is associated with several (including 0) instructors via
advisor

Many to One
Relationship

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 ▪ An instructor is associated with several (possibly 0) students via advisor
▪ A student is associated with several (possibly 0) instructors via advisor

Many to
Many
Relationship

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 ▪ Total participation (indicated by double line): every entity in the
entity set participates in at least one relationship in the relationship set

Total and
Partial
Participation
participation of student in advisor relation is total
▪ every student must have an associated instructor
▪ Partial participation: some entities may not participate in any
relationship in the relationship set
• Example: participation of instructor in advisor is partial

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 ▪A line may have an associated minimum and maximum cardinality, shown in the form
l..h, where l is the minimum and h the maximum cardinality
•A minimum value of 1 indicates total participation.
•A maximum value of 1 indicates that the entity participates in at most one
relationship
•A maximum value of * indicates no limit.
Expressing ▪Example
Complex
Constraints

•Instructor can advise 0 or more students. A student must have 1 advisor; cannot
have multiple advisors

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 ▪ Consider a section entity, which is uniquely identified by a course_id, semester,
year, and sec_id.

▪ Clearly, section entities are related to course entities. Suppose we create a

relationship set sec_course between entity sets section and course.

Weak Entity
Sets ▪ Note that the information in sec_course is redundant, since section already has
an attribute course_id, which identifies the course with which the section is
related.

▪ One option to deal with this redundancy is to get rid of the relationship
sec_course; however, by doing so the relationship between section and course
becomes implicit in an attribute, which is not desirable

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 ▪ An alternative way to deal with this redundancy is to not store the attribute
course_id in the section entity and to only store the remaining attributes
section_id, year, and semester.
• However, the entity set section then does not have enough attributes to
identify a particular section entity uniquely

▪ To deal with this problem, we treat the relationship sec_course as a special

relationship that provides extra information, in this case, the course_id, required
Weak Entity to identify section entities uniquely.
Sets
▪ A weak entity set is one whose existence is dependent on another entity, called
its identifying entity

▪ Instead of associating a primary key with a weak entity, we use the identifying
entity, along with extra attributes called discriminator to uniquely identify a
weak entity.

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 ▪ In E-R diagrams, a weak entity set is depicted via a double rectangle.

▪ We underline the discriminator of a weak entity set with a dashed line.

▪ The relationship set connecting the weak entity set to the identifying strong
entity set is depicted by a double diamond.

Weak Entity ▪ Primary key for section – (course_id, sec_id, semester, year)
Sets

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 ▪ Binary relationship
• involve two entity sets (or degree two).
• most relationship sets in a database system are
binary.
Relationship
sets with
Attributes

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 A1, A2, …, An are attributes
R = (A1, A2, …, An ) is a relation schema

Relation Example:
instructor = (ID, name, dept_name, salary)
Schema and
A relation instance r defined over schema R is denoted by r
Instance (R).
The current values a relation are specified by a table
An element t of relation r is called a tuple and is represented
by a row in a table

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 ▪ It is a top-down design approach.

▪ Different sub-groups are designated within an entity set, which are distinctive
from other entities in the set.

Specialization ▪ These sub-groupings become lower-level entity sets that have attributes or
participate in relationships that do not apply to the higher-level entity set.

▪ Attribute inheritance (is a relationship) – a lower-level entity set inherits all

the attributes and relationship participation of the higher-level entity set to
which it is linked.

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 • Overlapping – employee and student
• Disjoint – instructor and secretary
• Total and partial

Specialization

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 • A bottom-up approach

• Specialization and generalization are simple inversions of each other

Generalizatio • It combines a number of entity sets that share the same features into a
n higher-level entity set.

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Symbols used two or
in
ER-Notation more,
then
ticked
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Symbols used
in
ER-Notation

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Symbols used
in
ER-Notation

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Symbols used
in
ER-Notation

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