E-R Model Case Studies

1 : Suppose you are given the following requirements for a simple database for the
National Hockey League (NHL):

 the NHL has many teams,

 each team has a name, a city, a coach, a captain, and a set of players,
 each player belongs to only one team,
 each player has a name, a position (such as left wing or goalie), a skill level, and
a set of injury records,
 a team captain is also a player,
 a game is played between two teams (referred to as host_team and guest_team)
and has a date (such as May 11th, 1999) and a score (such as 4 to 2).
Construct a clean and concise ER diagram for the NHL database.
Answer :

2: A university registrar’s office maintains data about the following entities:

1. courses, including number, title, credits, syllabus, and prerequisites;
2. course offerings, including course number, year, semester, section number,
instructor(s), timings, and classroom;
3. students, including student-id, name, and program;
4. instructors, including identi-cation number, name, department, and title.
Further, the enrollment of students in courses and grades awarded to students in each course they
are enrolled for must be appropriately modeled. Construct an E-R diagram for the registrar’s
of-ce.Document all assumptions that you make about the mapping constraints.
Answer :

3:
(a) Construct an E-R diagram for a car-insurance company whose customers own one or more
cars each. Each car has associated with it zero to any number of recorded accidents.
Answer :

(b) Construct appropriate tables for the above ER Diagram ?

Car insurance tables:

person (driver-id, name, address)

car (license, year,model)

accident (report-number, date, location)

participated(driver-id, license, report-number, damage-amount)

4:
(a) Construct an E-R diagram for a hospital with a set of patients and a set of medical doctors.
Associate with each patient a log of the various tests and examinations conducted.
Answer :

(b) Construct appropriate tables for the above ER Diagram :

Patient(SS#, name, insurance)

Physician ( name, specialization)

Test-log( SS#, test-name, date, time)

Doctor-patient (physician-name, SS#)

Patient-history(SS#, test-name, date)

5: Consider a database used to record the marks that students get in different exams of different
course offerings.
a) Construct an E-R diagram that models exams as entities, and uses a ternary relationship, for
the above database.
Answer a :

b) Construct an alternative E-R diagram that uses only a binary relationship between students
and course-offerings. Make sure that only one relationship exists between a particular student
and course-offering pair, yet you can represent the marks that a student gets in different exams of
a course offering.
Answer b:
6: Design an E-R diagram for keeping track of the exploits of your favorite sports team. You
should store the matches played, the scores in each match, the players in each match and
individual player statistics for each match. Summary statistics should be modeled as derived
attributes.
Answer :

7 :Extend the E-R diagram of the previous question to track the same information for all teams in
a league.
Answer :
8 : Draw the E-R diagram which models an online bookstore.
Answer :
 9 : Consider a university database for the scheduling of classrooms for -final exams. This
database could be modeled as the single entity set exam, with attributes course-name, section-
number, room-number, and time. Alternatively, one or more additional entity sets could be
defined, along with relationship sets to replace some of the attributes of the exam entity set, as
 course with attributes name, department, and c-number
 section with attributes s-number and enrollment, and dependent as a
weak entity set on course
 room with attributes r-number, capacity, and building
Show an E-R diagram illustrating the use of all three additional entity sets listed.
Answer :
 10 : Construct an ER Diagram for Company having following details :
 Company organized into DEPARTMENT. Each department has unique name
and a particular employee who manages the department. Start date for the manager is
recorded. Department may have several locations.
 A department controls a number of PROJECT. Projects have a unique name,
number and a single location.
 Company’s EMPLOYEE name, ssno, address, salary, sex and birth date
are recorded. An employee is assigned to one department, but may work for several
projects (not necessarily controlled by her dept). Number of
hours/week an employee works on each project is recorded; The immediate supervisor
for the employee.
 Employee’s DEPENDENT are tracked for health insurance purposes (dependent
name, birthdate, relationship to employee).
Answer :
Application of Business Intelligence in
Retail Industry
ZARA is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer based in Arteixo, Galicia. Founded in 24 May
,1975 by Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera, the brand is renowned for it’s ability to deliver new
clothes to stores quickly and in small batches. Zara needs just two weeks to develop a new
product and get it to stores, compared to the six-month industry average, and launches around
10,000 new designs each year. Zara was described by Louis Vuitton Fashion Director Daniel
Piette as “possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world. The company
produces about 450 million items a year for its 1,770 stores in 86 countries.

The Zara has made of use of Information Systems (IS) and to advance in many areas. This has
resulted in huge success for the company. This included application of Business intelligence (BI)
involves technologies, practices for collection, integration and applications to analyze and
present business information. The main aim of business intelligence is to promote better
business decision making.

BI describes a group of information on concepts and methods to better decision making in

business. This is achieved by employing a fact based support systems. The intelligence systems
are data-driven and sometimes used in executive information systems. Predictive views on
business operations can be provided by use of BI systems. predictive views on business
operations can be provided by use of BI systems since historical and current data has been
gathered into a data bank performance management benchmarking is done whereby
information on other companies in the same industry is gathered.

Since the Zara’s have large network and therefore dealing with large volumes of data, an
enterprise information system has been employed in the firm. This is generally a type of
computing systems that involves an enterprise class that is, typically offering total quality
service handling large volumes of data and able to sustain a big organization. With this system,
a technology platform is provided which enables the enterprise is provided to that information
can be shared in all useful levels of management enterprise systems are important in removing
the problem of fragmentation of information. This happens when there are numerous