Chapter 6: Database Design Using the E-R Model

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline

▪ Overview of the Design Process

▪ The Entity-Relationship Model
▪ Complex Attributes
▪ Mapping Cardinalities
▪ Primary Key
▪ Removing Redundant Attributes in Entity Sets
▪ Reducing ER Diagrams to Relational Schemas
▪ Extended E-R Features
▪ Entity-Relationship Design Issues

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Design Phases

▪ 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
database.
• 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.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Design Phases (Cont.)

▪ 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.
▪ Business decision – What attributes should we record in the database?
▪ 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Design Alternatives

▪ In designing a database schema, we must ensure that we avoid two 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
difficult or impossible to model.
▪ Avoiding bad designs is not enough. There may be a large number of good
designs from which we must choose.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Design Approaches

▪ Entity Relationship Model (covered in this chapter)

• Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and relationships
▪ Entity: a “thing” or “object” in the enterprise that is distinguishable from
other objects
• Described by a set of attributes
▪ Relationship: an association among several entities
• Represented diagrammatically by an entity-relationship diagram:
▪ Normalization Theory (Chapter 7)
• Formalize what designs are bad, and test for them

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 ER model -- Database Modeling

▪ The ER data mode was developed to facilitate database design by allowing

specification of an enterprise schema that represents the overall logical structure
of a database.
▪ The ER data model employs three basic concepts:
• entity sets,
• relationship sets,
• attributes.
▪ The ER model also has an associated diagrammatic representation, the ER
diagram, which can express the overall logical structure of a database
graphically.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Entity Sets

▪ 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
▪ 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 -- instructor and student

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 Representing Entity sets in ER Diagram

▪ Entity sets can be represented graphically as follows:

• Rectangles represent entity sets.
• Attributes listed inside entity rectangle
• Underline indicates primary key attributes

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Relationship Sets

▪ A relationship is an association among several entities

Example:
44553 (Peltier) advisor 22222 (Einstein)
student entity relationship set instructor entity
▪ 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Relationship Sets (Cont.)

▪ Example: we define the relationship set advisor to denote the associations

between students and the instructors who act as their advisors.
▪ Pictorially, we draw a line between related entities.

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 Representing Relationship Sets via ER Diagrams

▪ Diamonds represent relationship sets.

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 Relationship Sets (Cont.)

▪ An attribute can also be associated with a relationship set.

▪ For instance, the advisor relationship set between entity sets instructor and
student may have the attribute date which tracks when the student started being
associated with the advisor

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 Relationship Sets with Attributes

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 Roles

▪ Entity sets of a relationship need not be distinct

• Each occurrence of an entity set plays a “role” in the relationship
▪ The labels “course_id” and “prereq_id” are called roles.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Degree of a Relationship Set

▪ Binary relationship
• involve two entity sets (or degree two).
• most relationship sets in a database system are binary.
▪ Relationships between more than two entity sets are rare. Most relationships are
binary. (More on this later.)
• Example: students work on research projects under the guidance of an
instructor.
• relationship proj_guide is a ternary relationship between instructor, student,
and project

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Non-binary Relationship Sets

▪ Most relationship sets are binary

▪ There are occasions when it is more convenient to represent relationships as
non-binary.
▪ E-R Diagram with a Ternary Relationship

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Complex Attributes

▪ Attribute types:
• Simple and composite attributes.
• Single-valued and multivalued attributes
▪ Example: multivalued attribute: phone_numbers
• Derived attributes
▪ 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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 Composite Attributes

▪ Composite attributes allow us to divided attributes into subparts (other

attributes).

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 Representing Complex Attributes in ER Diagram

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 Mapping Cardinality Constraints

▪ 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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 - 7th Edition 6.23 ©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 - 7th Edition 6.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representing Cardinality Constraints in ER Diagram

▪ 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.

▪ One-to-one relationship between an instructor and a student :

• A student is associated with at most one instructor via the relationship
advisor
• A student is associated with at most one department via stud_dept

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 One-to-Many Relationship

▪ one-to-many relationship between an instructor and a student

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

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 Many-to-One Relationships

▪ In a many-to-one relationship between an instructor and a student,

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

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 Many-to-Many Relationship

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

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

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 Total and Partial Participation

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

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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 Notation for Expressing More Complex Constraints

▪ 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.
▪ Example

• Instructor can advise 0 or more students. A student must have 1 advisor;

cannot have multiple advisors

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.30 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Primary Key

▪ Primary keys provide a way to specify how entities and relations are
distinguished. We will consider:
• Entity sets
• Relationship sets.
• Weak entity sets

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 Primary key for Entity Sets

▪ By definition, individual entities are distinct.

▪ From database perspective, the differences among them must be expressed in
terms of their attributes.
▪ The values of the attribute values of an entity must be such that they can
uniquely identify the entity.
• No two entities in an entity set are allowed to have exactly the same value
for all attributes.
▪ A key for an entity is a set of attributes that suffice to distinguish entities from
each other

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 Primary Key for Relationship Sets

▪ To distinguish among the various relationships of a relationship set we use the

individual primary keys of the entities in the relationship set.
• Let R be a relationship set involving entity sets E1, E2, .. En
• The primary key for R is consists of the union of the primary keys of entity
sets E1, E2, ..En
• If the relationship set R has attributes a1, a2, .., am associated with it, then
the primary key of R also includes the attributes a1, a2, .., am
▪ Example: relationship set “advisor”.
• The primary key consists of instructor.ID and student.ID
▪ The choice of the primary key for a relationship set depends on the mapping
cardinality of the relationship set.

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 Weak Entity Sets

▪ 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.
▪ 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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 Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)

▪ 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 to
identify section entities uniquely.
▪ 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.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.35 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)

▪ An entity set that is not a weak entity set is termed a strong entity set.
▪ Every weak entity must be associated with an identifying entity; that is, the weak
entity set is said to be existence dependent on the identifying entity set.
▪ The identifying entity set is said to own the weak entity set that it identifies.
▪ The relationship associating the weak entity set with the identifying entity set is
called the identifying relationship.
▪ Note that the relational schema we eventually create from the entity set section
does have the attribute course_id, for reasons that will become clear later, even
though we have dropped the attribute course_id from the entity set section.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.36 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Expressing Weak Entity Sets

▪ 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.
▪ Primary key for section – (course_id, sec_id, semester, year)

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 E-R Diagram for a University Enterprise

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 Reduction to Relation Schemas

▪ Entity sets and relationship sets can be expressed uniformly as relation schemas
that represent the contents of the database.
▪ A database which conforms to an E-R diagram can be represented by a collection
of schemas.
▪ For each entity set and relationship set there is a unique schema that is assigned
the name of the corresponding entity set or relationship set.
▪ Each schema has a number of columns (generally corresponding to attributes),
which have unique names.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.39 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representing Entity Sets

▪ A strong entity set reduces to a schema with the same attributes

student(ID, name, tot_cred)

▪ A weak entity set becomes a table that includes a column for the primary key of
the identifying strong entity set

section ( course_id, sec_id, sem, year )

▪ Example

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 Representation of Entity Sets with Composite Attributes

▪ Composite attributes are flattened out by creating a separate

attribute for each component attribute
• Example: given entity set instructor with composite
attribute name with component attributes first_name and
last_name the schema corresponding to the entity set has
two attributes name_first_name and name_last_name
▪ Prefix omitted if there is no ambiguity
(name_first_name could be first_name)
▪ Ignoring multivalued attributes, extended instructor schema is
• instructor(ID,
first_name, middle_initial, last_name,
street_number, street_name,
apt_number, city, state, zip_code,
date_of_birth)

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.41 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representation of Entity Sets with Multivalued Attributes

▪ A multivalued attribute M of an entity E is represented by a separate schema EM

▪ Schema EM has attributes corresponding to the primary key of E and an attribute
corresponding to multivalued attribute M
▪ Example: Multivalued attribute phone_number of instructor is represented by a
schema:
inst_phone= ( ID, phone_number)
▪ Each value of the multivalued attribute maps to a separate tuple of the relation
on schema EM
• For example, an instructor entity with primary key 22222 and phone
numbers 456-7890 and 123-4567 maps to two tuples:
(22222, 456-7890) and (22222, 123-4567)

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.42 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representing Relationship Sets

▪ A many-to-many relationship set is represented as a schema with attributes for

the primary keys of the two participating entity sets, and any descriptive
attributes of the relationship set.
▪ Example: schema for relationship set advisor

advisor = (s_id, i_id)

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 Extended E-R Features

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 Specialization

▪ Top-down design process; we designate sub-groupings within an entity set that are
distinctive from other entities in the set.
▪ 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.
▪ Depicted by a triangle component labeled ISA (e.g., instructor “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
▪ Overlapping – employee and student
▪ Disjoint – instructor and secretary
▪ Total and partial

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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.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.47 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Aggregation

▪ Consider the ternary relationship proj_guide, which we saw earlier

▪ Suppose we want to record evaluations of a student by a guide on a project

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.48 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Aggregation (Cont.)

▪ Relationship sets eval_for and proj_guide represent overlapping information

• Every eval_for relationship corresponds to a proj_guide relationship
• However, some proj_guide relationships may not correspond to any eval_for
relationships
▪ So we can’t discard the proj_guide relationship
▪ Eliminate this redundancy via aggregation
• Treat relationship as an abstract entity
• Allows relationships between relationships
• Abstraction of relationship into new entity

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.49 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Aggregation (Cont.)

▪ Eliminate this redundancy via aggregation without introducing redundancy, the

following diagram represents:
• A student is guided by a particular instructor on a particular project
• A student, instructor, project combination may have an associated evaluation

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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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 Summary of Symbols Used in E-R Notation

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 Symbols Used in E-R Notation (Cont.)

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 End of Chapter 6

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 6.54 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan