Chapter 7: Entity-Relationship Model

Chapter 7: Entity-Relationship Model

 Design Process
 Modeling
 Constraints
 E-R Diagram
 Design Issues
 Weak Entity Sets
 Extended E-R Features
 Design of the Bank Database
 Reduction to Relation Schemas
 Database Design
 UML
 Modeling

 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
 Entity Sets instructor and student

instructor_ID instructor_name student-ID student_name

 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
Relationship Set advisor
 Relationship Sets (Cont.)

 An attribute can also be property of 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
 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.
 Example: students work on research projects under the
guidance of an instructor.
 relationship proj_guide is a ternary relationship between
instructor, student, and project
 Attributes

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

properties possessed by all members of an entity set.
 Example:
instructor = (ID, name, street, city, salary )
course= (course_id, title, credits)
 Domain – the set of permitted values for each attribute
 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
Composite Attributes
 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
 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
 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
 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
 ID is candidate key of instructor
 course_id is candidate key of course
 Although several candidate keys may exist, one of the candidate
keys is selected to be the primary key.
 Keys for Relationship Sets

 The combination of primary keys of the participating entity sets forms a

super key of a relationship set.
 (s_id, i_id) is the super key of advisor
 NOTE: this means a pair of entity sets can have at most one
relationship in a particular relationship set.
 Example: if we wish to track multiple meeting dates between a
student and her advisor, we cannot assume a relationship for
each meeting. We can use a multivalued attribute though
 Must consider the mapping cardinality of the relationship set when
deciding what are the candidate keys
 Need to consider semantics of relationship set in selecting the primary
key in case of more than one candidate key
 Redundant Attributes
 Suppose we have entity sets
 instructor, with attributes including dept_name
 department
and a relationship
 inst_dept relating instructor and department
 Attribute dept_name in entity instructor is redundant since there is an
explicit relationship inst_dept which relates instructors to departments
 The attribute replicates information present in the relationship, and
should be removed from instructor
 BUT: when converting back to tables, in some cases the attribute
gets reintroduced, as we will see.
 E-R Diagrams

 Rectangles represent entity sets.

 Diamonds represent relationship sets.
 Attributes listed inside entity rectangle
 Underline indicates primary key attributes
Entity With Composite, Multivalued, and Derived
Attributes
Relationship Sets with Attributes
 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.
 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.
 One-to-one relationship:
 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
 One-to-One Relationship

 one-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 at most one instructor via
advisor
 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,
 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
 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
 Participation of an Entity Set in a
Relationship Set
 Total participation (indicated by double line): every entity in the
entity set participates in at least one relationship in the relationship
set
 E.g., participation of section in sec_course is total
 every section must have an associated course
 Partial participation: some entities may not participate in any
relationship in the relationship set
 Example: participation of instructor in advisor is partial
Alternative Notation for Cardinality Limits

 Cardinality limits can also express participation constraints

E-R Diagram with a Ternary Relationship
 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 proj_guide to instructor indicates each student has
at most one guide for a project
 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
 How about doing an ER design
interactively on the board?
Suggest an application to be modeled.
 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 set’s discriminator.
 Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)
 We underline the discriminator of a weak entity set with a dashed
line.
 We put the identifying relationship of a weak entity in a double
diamond.
 Primary key for section – (course_id, sec_id, semester, year)
 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 course_id were explicitly stored, section could be made a strong
entity, but then the relationship between section and course would
be duplicated by an implicit relationship defined by the attribute
course_id common to course and section
E-R Diagram for a University Enterprise
Reduction to Relational Schemas
 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.
 Representing Entity Sets With Simple
Attributes

 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 )
 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)
 Redundancy of Schemas
 Many-to-one and one-to-many relationship sets that are total on the
many-side can be represented by adding an extra attribute to the
“many” side, containing the primary key of the “one” side
 Example: Instead of creating a schema for relationship set inst_dept,
add an attribute dept_name to the schema arising from entity set
instructor
 Redundancy of Schemas (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, replacing a schema by
an extra attribute in the schema corresponding to the “many” side
could result in null values
 The schema corresponding to a relationship set linking a weak
entity set to its identifying strong entity set is redundant.
 Example: The section schema already contains the attributes
that would appear in the sec_course schema
Composite and Multivalued 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
 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)
 Composite and 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)
 Multivalued Attributes (Cont.)
 Special case:entity time_slot has only one attribute other than the
primary-key attribute, and that attribute is multivalued
 Optimization: Don’t create the relation corresponding to the entity,
just create the one corresponding to the multivalued attribute
 time_slot(time_slot_id, day, start_time, end_time)
 Caveat: time_slot attribute of section (from sec_time_slot) cannot be
a foreign key due to this optimization
 Design Issues
 Use of entity sets vs. attributes

 Use of phone as an entity allows extra information about phone numbers

(plus multiple phone numbers)
 Design Issues
 Use of entity sets vs. relationship sets
Possible guideline is to designate a relationship set to describe an action
that occurs between entities
 Design Issues
 Binary versus n-ary relationship sets
Although it is possible to replace any nonbinary (n-ary, for n > 2)
relationship set by a number of distinct binary relationship sets, a n-ary
relationship set shows more clearly that several entities participate in a
single relationship.
 Placement of relationship attributes
e.g., attribute date as attribute of advisor or as attribute of student
 Binary Vs. Non-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)
 But there are some relationships that are naturally non-binary
 Example: proj_guide
Converting Non-Binary Relationships to Binary Form

 In general, any non-binary relationship can be represented using binary

relationships by creating an artificial entity set.
 Replace R between entity sets A, B and C by an entity set E, and
three relationship sets:
1. RA, relating E and A 2. RB, relating E and B
3. RC, relating E and C
 Create a special identifying attribute for E
 Add any attributes of R to E
 For each relationship (ai , bi , ci) in R, create
1. a new entity ei in the entity set E 2. add (ei , ai ) to RA
3. add (ei , bi ) to RB 4. add (ei , ci ) to RC
 Converting Non-Binary Relationships
(Cont.)
 Also need to translate constraints
 Translating all constraints may not be possible
 There may be instances in the translated schema that
cannot correspond to any instance of R
 Exercise: add constraints to the relationships RA, RB and
RC to ensure that a newly created entity corresponds to
exactly one entity in each of entity sets A, B and C
 We can avoid creating an identifying attribute by making E a
weak entity set (described shortly) identified by the three
relationship sets
Extended ER Features
 Extended E-R Features: 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., 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.
Specialization Example
 Extended ER Features: 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.
Specialization and Generalization (Cont.)

 Can have multiple specializations of an entity set based on different

features.
 E.g., permanent_employee vs. temporary_employee, in addition to
instructor vs. secretary
 Each particular employee would be
 a member of one of permanent_employee or temporary_employee,
 and also a member of one of instructor, secretary
 The ISA relationship also referred to as superclass - subclass
relationship
 Design Constraints on a
Specialization/Generalization
 Constraint on which entities can be members of a given lower-level entity
set.
 condition-defined
 Example: all customers over 65 years are members of senior-
citizen entity set; senior-citizen ISA person.
 user-defined
 Constraint on whether or not entities may belong to more than one lower-
level entity set within a single generalization.
 Disjoint
 an entity can belong to only one lower-level entity set
 Noted in E-R diagram by having multiple lower-level entity sets link
to the same triangle
 Overlapping
 an entity can belong to more than one lower-level entity set
 Design Constraints on a
Specialization/Generalization (Cont.)
 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
 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
 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
 Aggregation (Cont.)
 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
 Representing Specialization via
Schemas
 Method 1:
 Form a schema for the higher-level entity
 Form a schema for each lower-level entity set, include primary key
of higher-level entity set and local attributes

schema attributes
person ID, name, street, city
student ID, tot_cred
employee ID, salary
 Drawback: getting information about, an employee requires
accessing two relations, the one corresponding to the low-level
schema and the one corresponding to the high-level schema
 Representing Specialization as Schemas
(Cont.)
 Method 2:
 Form a schema for each entity set with all local and inherited attributes
schema attributes
person ID, name, street, city
student ID, name, street, city, tot_cred
employee ID, name, street, city, salary
 If specialization is total, the schema for the generalized entity set
(person) not required to store information
 Can be defined as a “view” relation containing union of
specialization relations
 But explicit schema may still be needed for foreign key constraints
 Drawback: name, street and city may be stored redundantly for people
who are both students and employees
 Schemas Corresponding to Aggregation

 To represent aggregation, create a schema containing

 primary key of the aggregated relationship,
 the primary key of the associated entity set
 any descriptive attributes
 Schemas Corresponding to
Aggregation (Cont.)
 For example, to represent aggregation manages between
relationship works_on and entity set manager, create a schema
eval_for (s_ID, project_id, i_ID, evaluation_id)
 Schema proj_guide is redundant provided we are willing to store null
values for attribute manager_name in relation on schema manages
 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.
How about doing another ER design
interactively on the board?
Summary of Symbols Used in E-R Notation
Symbols Used in E-R Notation (Cont.)
 Alternative ER Notations
 Chen, IDE1FX, …
Alternative ER Notations

Chen IDE1FX (Crows feet notation)

 UML

 UML: Unified Modeling Language

 UML has many components to graphically model different aspects
of an entire software system
 UML Class Diagrams correspond to E-R Diagram, but several
differences.
 ER vs. UML Class Diagrams

*Note reversal of position in cardinality constraint depiction

 ER vs. UML Class Diagrams
ER Diagram Notation Equivalent in UML

*Generalization can use merged or separate arrows independent

of disjoint/overlapping
 UML Class Diagrams (Cont.)

 Binary relationship sets are represented in UML by just drawing a

line connecting the entity sets. The relationship set name is written
adjacent to the line.
 The role played by an entity set in a relationship set may also be
specified by writing the role name on the line, adjacent to the entity
set.
 The relationship set name may alternatively be written in a box,
along with attributes of the relationship set, and the box is
connected, using a dotted line, to the line depicting the relationship
set.
End of Chapter 7