DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

TERM 2008-09

B. Tech II/IT II Semester

UNIT-II PPT SLIDES

Text Books: (1) DBMS by Raghu Ramakrishnan

(2) DBMS by Sudarshan and Korth
 Database Design

• Conceptual design: (ER Model is used at this stage.)

– What are the entities and relationships in the
enterprise?
– What information about these entities and
relationships should we store in the database?
– What are the integrity constraints or business rules
that hold?
– A database `schema’ in the ER Model can be
represented pictorially (ER diagrams).
– Can map an ER diagram into a relational schema.

Slide No:L2-1
 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

Slide No:L2-2
Entity Sets customer and loan
customer_id customer_ customer_ customer_ loan_ amount
name street city number

Slide No:L2-3
 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 attributes: They are not divided into parts.
– Composite attributes: Divided into parts. Ex:
Name can be divided into First name, middle
name, Last Name.

Slide No:L2-4
 Composite Attributes

Single-valued attribute: Loan Number, Name etc.

multi-valued attributes:
Example: A person have more than one
phone_numbers
Derived attributes
Can be computed from other attributes
Example: age, given date_of_birth

Slide No:L2-5
E-R Diagram with different
Attributes

Slide No:L5-2
Binary & Ternary
Relationship

Slide No:L5-2
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

Slide No:L2-6
 Mapping Cardinalities

The edge between loan and borrower has a cardinality constraint of

1..1, meaning the minimum and the maximum cardinality are both 1.
That is, each loan must have exactly one associated customer. The
limit 0..∗on the edge from customer to borrower indicates that a
customer can have zero or more loans. Thus, the relationship
borrower is one to many from customer to loan, and further the
participation of loan in borrower is total.

Slide No:L5-2
 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

Slide No:L2-7
 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

Slide No:L2-8
 ER Model Basics

name
ssn lot

Employees
• Entity: Real-world object distinguishable from other
objects. An entity is described (in DB) using a set of
attributes.
• A relationship is an association among several entities.
• Entity Set: A collection of similar entities. E.g., all
employees.
– All entities in an entity set have the same set of
attributes.
– Each entity set has a key.
– Each attribute has a domain.

Slide No:L2-9
 ER Model Basics (Contd.)
name

ssn lot
since
name dname
ssn lot did budget Employees

super- subord
Employees Works_In Departments visor inate
Reports_To

• Relationship: Association among two or more entities. E.g.,

Attishoo works in Pharmacy department.
• Relationship Set: Collection of similar relationships.
– An n-ary relationship set R relates n entity sets E1 ... En;
each relationship in R involves entities e1 E1, ..., en En
• Same entity set could participate in different
relationship sets, or in different “roles” in same set.

Slide No:L2-10
 Relationship Sets
• A relationship is an association among several
entities
Example:
Hayes depositor A-102
customer entity relationship set
account 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:
(Hayes, A-102)  depositor
Slide No:L3-1
Relationship Set borrower

Slide No:L3-2
 Relationship Sets (Cont.)
• An attribute can also be property of a
relationship set.
• For instance, the depositor relationship set
between entity sets customer and account may
have the attribute access-date

Slide No:L3-3
 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.

Slide No:L3-4
 Degree of a Relationship Set
Example: 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 rare. Most relationships are binary. (More on
this later.)

Slide No:L3-5
 Additional
since
features of the name dname
ER model
ssn lot did budget

Key Constraints
Employees Manages Departments

• Consider Works_In:
An employee can
work in many
departments; a dept
can have many
employees.
• In contrast, each
dept has at most one
manager, according
to the key
constraint on 1-to-1 1-to Many Many-to-1 Many-to-Many
Manages.
Slide No:L4-1
 Participation Constraints
• Does every department have a manager?
– If so, this is a participation constraint: the
participation of Departments in Manages is said to
be total (vs. partial).

For example, we expect every loan entity to be related to at

least one customer through the borrower relationship.
Therefore the participation of loan in the relationship set
borrower is total.

it is possible that only some of the customer entities are

related to the loan entity set through the borrower
relationship, and the participation of customer in the
borrower relationship set is therefore partial
Notations

Slide No:L5-2
 Weak Entities
• A weak entity can be identified uniquely only by
considering the primary key of another (owner) entity.
– Owner entity set and weak entity set must participate
in a one-to-many relationship set (one owner, many
weak entities).
– Weak entity set must have total participation in this
identifying relationship set.

name
cost pname age
ssn lot

Employees Policy Dependents

Slide No:L4-3
 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.
Slide No:L4-4
 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)

Slide No:L4-5
 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

Slide No:L4-6
 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 course_number attribute

Slide No:L4-7
 ISA (`is a’) Hierarchies
name
 As in C++, or other PLs, ssn lot

attributes are inherited.

 If we declare A ISA B, Employees

every A entity is also hours_worked

hourly_wages
considered to be a B ISA
contractid
entity.
Contract_Emps
Hourly_Emps

• Overlap constraints: Can Joe be an Hourly_Emps as well as a

Contract_Emps entity? (Allowed/disallowed)
• Covering constraints: Does every Employees entity also have
to be an Hourly_Emps or a Contract_Emps entity? (Yes/no)
• Reasons for using ISA:
– To add descriptive attributes specific to a subclass.
– To identify entitities that participate in a relationship.

Slide No:L5-1
 Aggregation
• Used when we have name
ssn lot
to model a
relationship involving Employees
(entitity sets and) a
relationship set.
– Aggregation
Monitors until
allows us to treat
a relationship set
as an entity set started_on since
dname
for purposes of pid pbudget did
participation in budget
(other) Projects Sponsors Departments
relationships.

 Aggregation vs. ternary relationship:

Monitors is a distinct relationship, with a descriptive attribute.
 Also, can say that each sponsorship is monitored by at most one

employee.
Slide No:L5-2
 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

Slide No:L5-3
 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 can’t 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

Slide No:L5-4
 Aggregation (Cont.)
• 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

Slide No:L5-5
E-R Diagram With Aggregation

Slide No:L5-6
 Conceptual Design Using the ER Model

• Design choices:
– Should a concept be modeled as an entity or an
attribute?
– Should a concept be modeled as an entity or a
relationship?
– Identifying relationships: Binary or ternary?
Aggregation?
• Constraints in the ER Model:
– A lot of data semantics can (and should) be captured.
– But some constraints cannot be captured in ER
diagrams.

Slide No:L6-1
 Entity vs. Attribute
• Should address be an attribute of Employees or an entity
(connected to Employees by a relationship)?
• Depends upon the use we want to make of address
information, and the semantics of the data:
• If we have several addresses per employee,
address must be an entity (since attributes cannot
be set-valued).
• If the structure (city, street, etc.) is important, e.g.,
we want to retrieve employees in a given city,
address must be modeled as an entity (since
attribute values are atomic).

Slide No:L6-2
 Entity vs. Attribute (Contd.)
• Works_In4 does not
allow an employee
from to
to work in a name dname
department for ssn lot did budget
two or more periods.
• Similar to the Employees Works_In4 Departments
problem of wanting
to record several
addresses for an
employee: We want
to record several
values of the name dname
ssn lot did budget
descriptive attributes
for each instance of Works_In4 Departments
Employees
this relationship.
Accomplished by
introducing new from Duration to
entity set, Duration.
Slide No:L6-3
 Entity vs. Relationship

• First ER diagram OK if a
manager gets a since dbudget
name dname
separate discretionary ssn lot did budget
budget for each dept.
• What if a manager gets Employees Manages2 Departments
a discretionary budget
that covers all
managed depts? name
ssn lot
– Redundancy: dbudget
stored for each dept since dname
Employees did budget
managed by
manager.
Manages2 Departments
– Misleading: Suggests ISA
dbudget associated
with department-mgr
combination. Managers dbudget
This fixes the
problem!
Slide No:L6-4
 Binary vs. Ternary Relationships

• If each policy is name

owned by just 1 ssn lot pname age
employee, and Employees Dependents
Covers
each dependent
is tied to the Bad design Policies
covering policy,
first diagram is policyid cost
inaccurate. name pname age
• What are the ssn lot

additional Dependents
Employees
constraints in
the 2nd Purchaser
Beneficiary
diagram?
Better design Policies

Slide No:L6-5
policyid cost
 Binary vs. Ternary Relationships
(Contd.)

• Previous example illustrated a case when two binary

relationships were better than one ternary relationship.
• An example in the other direction: a ternary relation
Contracts relates entity sets Parts, Departments and
Suppliers, and has descriptive attribute qty. No
combination of binary relationships is an adequate
substitute:
– S “can-supply” P, D “needs” P, and D “deals-with” S
does not imply that D has agreed to buy P from S.
– How do we record qty?

Slide No:L6-6
 Summary of Conceptual Design

• Conceptual design follows requirements analysis,

– Yields a high-level description of data to be stored
• ER model popular for conceptual design
– Constructs are expressive, close to the way people think
about their applications.
• Basic constructs: entities, relationships, and attributes (of
entities and relationships).
• Some additional constructs: weak entities, ISA hierarchies,
and aggregation.
• Note: There are many variations on ER model.

Slide No:L7-1
 Summary of ER (Contd.)

• Several kinds of integrity constraints can be expressed in

the ER model: key constraints, participation constraints,
and overlap/covering constraints for ISA hierarchies. Some
foreign key constraints are also implicit in the definition of a
relationship set.
– Some constraints (notably, functional dependencies)
cannot be expressed in the ER model.
– Constraints play an important role in determining the
best database design for an enterprise.

Slide No:L7-2
 Summary of ER (Contd.)

• ER design is subjective. There are often many ways to

model a given scenario! Analyzing alternatives can be
tricky, especially for a large enterprise. Common
choices include:
– Entity vs. attribute, entity vs. relationship, binary or n-
ary relationship, whether or not to use ISA
hierarchies, and whether or not to use aggregation.
• Ensuring good database design: resulting relational
schema should be analyzed and refined further. FD
information and normalization techniques are especially
useful.

Slide No:L7-3