Chapter 2: EntityEntity-Relationship Model

Whats the use of the E-R model? Entity Sets Relationship Sets Design Issues Mapping Constraints Keys E-R Diagram Extended E-R Features Design of an E-R Database Schema Reduction of an E-R Schema to Tables

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E-R Diagrams

Rectangles represent entity sets. Diamonds represent relationship sets. Lines link attributes to entity sets and entity sets to relationship sets. Ellipses represent attributes Double ellipses represent multivalued attributes. Dashed ellipses denote derived attributes. Underline indicates primary key attributes (will study later)
Database System Concepts 2.2 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan

Attributes
An entity is represented by a set of attributes, that is descriptive

properties possessed by all members of an entity set. Example: customer = (customer-id, customer-name, customer-street, customer-city) loan = (loan-number, amount) Domain the set of permitted values for each attribute Attribute types: Simple and composite attributes. Single-valued and multi-valued attributes
E.g.

multivalued attribute: phone-numbers be computed from other attributes age, given date of birth

Derived attributes
Can E.g.

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Entity Sets
A database can be modeled as:

a collection of entities, relationship among entities.

An entity is an object that exists and is distinguishable from other

objects. Example: specific person, company, event, plant

Entities have attributes

Example: people have names and addresses

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

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Relationship Sets with Attributes

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E-R Diagram With Composite, Multivalued, and Derived Attributes Attributestry to avoid them

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Composite Attributes

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Roles
Entity sets of a relationship need not be distinct
The labels manager and worker are called roles; they specify how

employee entities interact via the works-for relationship set.

Roles are indicated in E-R diagrams by labeling the lines that connect

diamonds to rectangles.
Role labels are optional, and are used to clarify semantics of the

relationship

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Mapping Cardinalities
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 following types: One to one One to many Many to one Many to many

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Mapping Cardinalities

One to one

One to many

Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any elements in the other set
Database System Concepts 2.10 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan

Mapping Cardinalities

Many to one

Many to many

Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any elements in the other set
Database System Concepts 2.11 Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan

OneOne-ToTo-Many Relationship
In the one-to-many relationship a loan is associated with at most

one customer via borrower, a customer is associated with several (including 0) loans via borrower

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ManyMany-ToTo-One Relationships
Example of many-to-one relationships: a loan is associated with

several (including 0) customers via borrower, a customer is associated with at most one loan via borrower

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Cardinality Constraints
We express cardinality constraints by drawing either a directed

line (), signifying one, or an undirected line (), signifying many, between the relationship set and the entity set.
Example of One-to-one relationship:

A customer is associated with at most one loan via the relationship

borrower

A loan is associated with at most one customer via borrower

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ManyMany-ToTo-Many Relationship

Example of Many to Many Relationships:

A customer is associated with several (possibly 0) loans via

borrower

A loan is associated with several (possibly 0) customers via

borrower

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Alternative Notation for Cardinality Limits

Cardinality limits can also express participation constraints

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Keys
A super key of an entity set is a set of one or more attributes

whose values uniquely determine each entity.

A candidate key of an entity set is a minimal super key

Customer-id is candidate key of customer account-number is candidate key of account

Although several candidate keys may exist, one of the

candidate keys is selected to be the primary key.

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Degree of a Relationship Set

Refers to number of entity sets that participate in a relationship

set.
Relationship sets that involve two entity sets are binary (or degree

two). Generally, most relationship sets in a database system are binary.

Relationship sets may involve more than two entity sets.

E.g. Suppose employees of a bank may have jobs (responsibilities)

at multiple branches, with different jobs at different branches. Then there is a ternary relationship set between entity sets employee, job and branch Relationships between more than two entity sets are not as

common as binary ones.

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E-R Diagram with a Ternary Relationship

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Cardinality Constraints on Ternary Relationship

We allow at most one arrow out of a ternary (or greater degree)

relationship to indicate a cardinality constraint

E.g. an arrow from works-on to job indicates each employee works

on at most one job at any branch.

If there is more than one arrow, there are two ways of defining the

meaning. E.g a ternary relationship R between A, B and C with arrows to B and C

could mean

1. each A entity is associated with a unique entity from B and C or 2. each pair of entities from (A, B) is associated with a unique C entity,
and each pair (A, C) is associated with a unique B

Each alternative has been used in different formalisms To avoid confusion we outlaw more than one arrow

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Binary Vs. NonNon-Binary Relationships

Some relationships that appear to be non-binary may be better

represented using binary relationships E.g. A ternary relationship parents, relating a child to his/her father and
mother, is best replaced by two binary relationships, father and mother
Using

two binary relationships allows partial information (e.g. only mother being know) works-on

But there are some relationships that are naturally non-binary

E.g.

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Weak Entity Sets

An entity set that does not have a primary key is referred to as a

weak entity set.

The existence of a weak entity set depends on the existence of a

identifying entity set it must relate to the identifying entity set via a total, one-to-many
relationship set from the identifying to the weak entity set

Identifying relationship depicted using a double diamond

The discriminator (or partial key) of a weak entity set is the set of

attributes that distinguishes among all the entities of a weak entity set.
The primary key of a weak entity set is formed by the primary key

of the strong entity set on which the weak entity set is existence dependent, plus the weak entity sets discriminator.

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Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)

We depict a weak entity set by double rectangles. We underline the discriminator of a weak entity set with a

dashed line.
payment-number discriminator of the payment entity set Primary key for payment (loan-number, payment-number)

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Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)

Note: the primary key of the strong entity set is not explicitly

stored with the weak entity set, since it is implicit in the identifying relationship.
If loan-number were explicitly stored, payment could be made a

strong entity, but then the relationship between payment and loan would be duplicated by an implicit relationship defined by the attribute loan-number common to payment and loan

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More Weak Entity Set Examples

In a university, a course is a strong entity and a course-offering

can be modeled as a weak entity

The discriminator of course-offering would be semester (including

year) and section-number (if there is more than one section)

If we model course-offering as a strong entity we would model

course-number as an attribute. Then the relationship with course would be implicit in the coursenumber attribute

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Specialization
Top-down design process; we designate subgroupings within an

entity set that are distinctive from other entities in the set.
These subgroupings become lower-level entity sets that have

attributes or participate in relationships that do not apply to the higher-level entity set.
Depicted by a triangle component labeled ISA (E.g. customer is a

person).
Attribute inheritance 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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Specialization Example

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Generalization
A bottom-up design process combine a number of entity sets

that share the same features into a higher-level entity set.

Specialization and generalization are simple inversions of each

other; they are represented in an E-R diagram in the same way.

The terms specialization and generalization are used

interchangeably.

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Specialization and Generalization (Contd.)

Can have multiple specializations of an entity set based on

different features.
E.g. permanent-employee vs. temporary-employee, in addition to

officer vs. secretary vs. teller

Each particular employee would be

a member of one of permanent-employee or temporary-employee, and also a member of one of officer, secretary, or teller
The ISA relationship also referred to as superclass - subclass

relationship

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Design Constraints on a Specialization/Generalization

Constraint on which entities can be members of a given

lower-level entity set. condition-defined

all customers over 65 years are members of seniorcitizen entity set; senior-citizen ISA person. user-defined Constraint on whether or not entities may belong to more than
E.g.

one lower-level entity set within a single generalization. Disjoint

an Noted

entity can belong to only one lower-level entity set in E-R diagram by writing disjoint next to the ISA triangle entity can belong to more than one lower-level entity set

Overlapping
an

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Design Constraints on aSpecialization/Generalization aSpecialization/Generalization (Contd.)

Completeness constraint -- specifies whether or not an entity in

the higher-level entity set must belong to at least one of the lower-level entity sets within a generalization. total : an entity must belong to one of the lower-level entity sets partial: an entity need not belong to one of the lower-level entity
sets

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Aggregation
Consider the ternary relationship works-on, which we saw earlier Suppose we want to record managers for tasks performed by an

employee at a branch

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Aggregation (Cont.)
Relationship sets works-on and manages represent overlapping

information Every manages relationship corresponds to a works-on relationship However, some works-on relationships may not correspond to any
manages relationships
So

we cant discard the works-on relationship

Eliminate this redundancy via aggregation

Treat relationship as an abstract entity Allows relationships between relationships Abstraction of relationship into new entity
Without introducing redundancy, the following diagram represents:

An employee works on a particular job at a particular branch An employee, branch, job combination may have an associated manager

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E-R Diagram With Aggregation

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E-R Design Decisions

The use of an attribute or entity set to represent an object. Whether a real-world concept is best expressed by an entity set

or a relationship set.
The use of a ternary relationship versus a pair of binary

relationships.
The use of a strong or weak entity set. The use of specialization/generalization contributes to

modularity in the design.

The use of aggregation can treat the aggregate entity set as a

single unit without concern for the details of its internal structure.

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E-R Diagram for a Banking Enterprise

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Summary of Symbols Used in EE-R Notation

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Summary of Symbols (Cont.)

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Alternative EE-R Notations

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Reduction of an EE-R Schema to Tables

1. A database which conforms to an E-R diagram can be

represented by a collection of tables

2. For each (strong) entity set there is a table having as

candidate key the key of the entity set

3. For relationship set there is a table having as columns

the keys of the participating entities. The candidate key for the table is determined by the cardinality constraints among participating entities.
4. A weak entity set becomes a table that includes a column

for the primary key of the identifying strong entity set

5. Inheritance to be discussed later

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ManyMany-ToTo-One Relationships
Example of many-to-one relationships: a loan is associated with

several (including 0) customers via borrower, a customer is associated with at most one loan via borrower

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Representing Entity Sets as Tables

A strong entity set reduces to a table with the same attributes.

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Representing Relationship Sets as Tables

A many-to-many relationship set is represented as a table with

columns for the primary keys of the two participating entity sets, and any descriptive attributes of the relationship set.
E.g.: table for relationship set borrower

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Redundancy of Tables
Table with equivalent keys can be merged together---as

in the 3NF design algorithm E.g.: Merge the tables account-branch with account

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Redundancy of Tables (Cont.)

For one-to-one relationship sets, either side can be chosen

to act as the many side

That is, extra attribute can be added to either of the tables corresponding to the two entity sets

If participation is partial on the many side null values

might be needed

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Composite and Multivalued Attributes

Previous rules hold for simple attributes Composite attributes are flattened out by creating a separate attribute

for each component attribute E.g. given entity set customer with composite attribute name with
component attributes first-name and last-name the table corresponding to the entity set has two attributes name.first-name and name.last-name

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Representing Weak Entity Sets

A weak entity set becomes a table that includes a column for

the primary key of the identifying strong entity set:

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Representing Specialization as Tables

Method 1: Form a table for the higher level entity Form a table for each lower level entity set, include primary key of
higher level entity set and local attributes table person customer employee table attributes name, street, city name, credit-rating name, salary

Drawback: getting information about, e.g., employee requires accessing two tables

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Representing Specialization as Tables (Cont.)

Method 2: Form a table for each entity set with all local and inherited
attributes table person customer employee table attributes name, street, city name, street, city, credit-rating name, street, city, salary

If specialization is total, no need to create table for generalized entity (person)

Drawback: street and city may be stored redundantly for persons who are both customers and employees

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Relations Corresponding to Aggregation

To represent aggregation, create a table containing primary key of the aggregated relationship, the primary key of the associated entity set Any descriptive attributes

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Relations Corresponding to Aggregation (Cont.)

E.g. to represent aggregation manages between relationship

works-on and entity set manager, create a table manages(employee-id, branch-name, title, manager-name)
Table works-on is redundant provided we are willing to store

null values for attribute manager-name in table manages

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End of Chapter 2

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