The document discusses key concepts in entity-relationship modeling including entities, attributes, relationships, keys, and cardinalities. It provides examples of entities like students and courses in a school database. It also covers entity types, relationship types, weak entities, total and partial participation, roles, and gives an example of modeling entities and relationships for a college domain.
The document discusses key concepts in entity-relationship modeling including entities, attributes, relationships, keys, and cardinalities. It provides examples of entities like students and courses in a school database. It also covers entity types, relationship types, weak entities, total and partial participation, roles, and gives an example of modeling entities and relationships for a college domain.
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it is a ppt about er model of database management system
The document discusses key concepts in entity-relationship modeling including entities, attributes, relationships, keys, and cardinalities. It provides examples of entities like students and courses in a school database. It also covers entity types, relationship types, weak entities, total and partial participation, roles, and gives an example of modeling entities and relationships for a college domain.
The document discusses key concepts in entity-relationship modeling including entities, attributes, relationships, keys, and cardinalities. It provides examples of entities like students and courses in a school database. It also covers entity types, relationship types, weak entities, total and partial participation, roles, and gives an example of modeling entities and relationships for a college domain.
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Amritpal Singh
Introduction The ER model defines the conceptual view of a database.
It works around real-world entities and the
associations among them.
At view level, the ER model is considered a good
option for designing databases. Basic Terms An entity can be a real-world object, either animate or inanimate, that can be easily identifiable.
For example, in a school database, students, teachers,
classes, and courses offered can be considered as entities.
All these entities have some attributes or properties
that give them their identity Basic Terms Entities are represented by means of their properties, called attributes.
All attributes have values.
For example, a student entity may have name, class,
and age as attributes. Types of Attributes Simple attribute Simple attributes are atomic values, which cannot be divided further. For example, a student's phone number is an atomic value of 10 digits.
Composite attribute Composite attributes are made of more than
one simple attribute. For example, a student's complete name may have first_name and last_name.
Derived attribute Derived attributes are the attributes that do not
exist in the physical database, but their values are derived from other attributes present in the database.
For example, average_salary in a department should not be saved
directly in the database, instead it can be derived. For another example, age can be derived from data_of_birth. Types of Attributes Single-value attribute Single-value attributes contain single value.
For example Social_Security_Number.
Multi-value attribute Multi-value attributes may
contain more than one values.
For example, a person can have more than one phone
number, email_address, etc. Basic Terms Entity-Set and Keys
Key is an attribute or collection of attributes that
uniquely identifies an entity among entity set.
For example, the roll_number of a student makes
him/her identifiable among students.
Super Key A set of attributes (one or more) that
collectively identifies an entity in an entity set. Basic Terms Candidate Key A minimal super key is called a candidate key. An entity set may have more than one candidate key.
Primary Key A primary key is one of the candidate
keys chosen by the database designer to uniquely identify the entity set. Basic Terms Relationship
The association among entities is called a relationship.
For example, an employee works_ata department, a
student enrolls in a course. Here, Works_at and Enrolls are called relationships. Basic Terms Relationship Set
A set of relationships of similar type is called a
relationship set.
Like entities, a relationship too can have attributes.
These attributes are called descriptive attributes. Basic Terms Degree of Relationship
The number of participating entities in a relationship
entity set, which can be associated with the number of entities of other set via relationship set. Basic Terms Basic Terms Basic Terms Basic Terms ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation ER Representation Weak and Strong Entity A weak entity is an entity that depends on the existence of another entity. In more technical terms it can defined as an entity that cannot be identified by its own attributes.
It uses a foreign key combined with its attributed to form the
primary key.
An entity like order item is a good example for this.
The order item will be meaningless without an order so it
depends on the existence of order. Weak and Strong Entity Weak and Strong Entity An entity set that has a primary key is called as Strong entity set.
Consider an entity set Payment which has three
attributes: payment_number, payment_date and payment_amount.
Although each payment entity is distinct but payment
for different loans may share the same payment number. Thus, this entity set does not have a primary key and it is an entity set Weak and Strong Entity A weak entity set does not have a primary key but we need a means of distinguishing among all those entries in the entity set that depend on one particular strong entity set.
The discriminator of a weak entity set is a set of
attributes that allows this distinction be made.
For example, payment_number acts as discriminator
for payment entity set. Weak and Strong Entity A member of a strong entity set is called dominant entity and member of weak entity set is called as subordinate entity. Weak and Strong Entity Total and Partial Participation Total and Partial Participation Relationships between entities can be optional or compulsory.
In our example, we could decide that a person is considered
to be a customer only if they have bought a product.
On the other hand, we could say that a customer is a person
whom we know about and whom we hope might buy somethingthat is, we can have people listed as customers in our database who never buy a product Total and Partial Participation In the first case, the customer entity has total participation in the bought relationship (all customers have bought a product, and we cant have a customer who hasnt bought a product), while in the second case it has partial participation (a customer can buy a product).
These are referred to as the participation constraints of
the relationship. Total and Partial Participation Employee head of department
Not all employees become a head, but department will
always be headed by one employee.
So employee participated partially in relationship.
Roles Example of ER Diagram In case of college, a college contain many departments Each dept. can offer any number of courses Many instructor can work in a dept. An instructor can work only in one dept. For each dept. there is head An instructor can be head of only one dept. Each instructor can take any no. of courses A course can be taken by only one instructor A student can enroll for any no. of courses Each course can have any no. of students Example of ER Diagram Step 1 : Identify the Entities
What are the entities here?
From the statements given, the entities are Department Course Instructor Student Example of ER Diagram Step 2 : Identify the relationships One department offers many courses. But one particular course can be offered by only one department. hence the cardinality between department and course is One to Many (1:N) One department has multiple instructors . But instructor belongs to only one department. Hence the cardinality between department and instructor is One to Many (1:N) One department has only one head and one head can be the head of only one department. Hence the cardinality is one to one. (1:1) One course can be enrolled by many students and one student can enroll for many courses. Hence the cardinality between course and student is Many to Many (M:N) One course is taught by only one instructor. But one instructor teaches many courses. Hence the cardinality between course and instructor is Many to One (N :1) Example of ER Diagram Step 3: Identify the key attributes
"Departmen_Name" can identify a department
uniquely. Hence Department_Name is the key attribute for the Entity "Department". Course_ID is the key attribute for "Course" Entity. Student_ID is the key attribute for "Student" Entity. Instructor_ID is the key attribute for "Instructor" Entity. Example of ER Diagram Step 4: Identify other relevant attributes For the department entity, other attributes are location For course entity, other attributes are course_name,duration For instructor entity, other attributes are first_name, last_name, phone For student entity, first_name, last_name, phone Example of ER Diagram Generalization Example Specialization Specialization Aggregation Aggregation is a process when relation between two entity is treated as a single entity.
Here the relation between Center and Course, is acting
as an Entity in relation with Visitor. Aggregation Aggregation The E-R model cannot express relationships among relationships.
When would we need such a thing?
Consider a DB with information about employees who
work on a particular project and use a number of machines doing that work. Aggregation Aggregation Relationship sets work and uses could be combined into a single set. However, they shouldn't be, as this would obscure the logical structure of this scheme.
The solution is to use aggregation.
An abstraction through which relationships are treated as
higher-level entities. For our example, we treat the relationship set work and the entity sets employee and project as a higher-level entity set called work. Aggregation
