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Lecture 3

Chapter 6 discusses Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams, which are essential for database design, representing the conceptual level of a database system. It covers key concepts such as entity sets, attributes, relationships, and various types of relationships including binary and ternary relationships, as well as weak entity sets and specialization. The chapter also highlights design considerations and notations used in ER diagrams.

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Harshita Sharma
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3 views34 pages

Lecture 3

Chapter 6 discusses Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams, which are essential for database design, representing the conceptual level of a database system. It covers key concepts such as entity sets, attributes, relationships, and various types of relationships including binary and ternary relationships, as well as weak entity sets and specialization. The chapter also highlights design considerations and notations used in ER diagrams.

Uploaded by

Harshita Sharma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Chapter 6: ER – Entity

Relationship Diagram
• Major components of ER diagram
• Practices

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ER

• 1976 proposed by Peter Chen


• ER diagram is widely used in database design
• Represent conceptual level of a database system
• Describe things and their relationships in high level

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Basic Concepts

• Entity set – an abstraction of similar things, e.g. cars, students


• An entity set contains many entities
• Attributes: common properties of the entities in a entity sets
• Relationship – specify the relations among entities from two or more
entity sets

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An Example

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Relationship

• A relationship may be thought as a set as well


• For binary relationship, it enumerates the pairs of entities that relate to each
other
• For example, entity set M = {Mike, Jack, Tom} entity set F = {Mary, Kate}.
The relationship set married between M and F may be {<Mike,Mary>,<Tom,
Kate>}

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Relationship Example

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Attribute of A Relationship Set

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Relationship

• The degree of a relationship = the number of entity sets that


participate in the relationship
• Mostly binary relationships
• Sometimes more
• Mapping cardinality of a relationship
• 1 –1
• 1 – many
• many – 1
• Many-many

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One-One and One-Many

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Many-one and many-many

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1- many

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Many - 1

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Many - many

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Alternative Cardinality
Specification

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Note on Mapping Cardinality

• Both many and 1 include 0


• Meaning some entity may not participate in the relationship

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Total Participation
•When we require all entities to participate in the
relationship (total participation), we use double lines
to specify

Every loan has to have at least one customer

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Self Relationship

• Sometimes entities in a entity set may relate to other entities in the


same set. Thus self relationship
• Here employees mange some other employees
• The labels “manger” and “worker” are called roles the self
relationship

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More examples on self-
relationship
• People to people
• Parent – children
• Manager – employee
• Husband – wife
• Word to word
• Root – synonym

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Attributes

• Both entity sets and relationships can have attributes


• Attributes may be
• Composite
• Multi-valued (double ellipse)
• Derive (dashed ellipse)

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Another Example

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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
• Although several candidate keys may exist, one of the candidate keys
is selected to be the primary key.

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Key Examples

• Suggest super keys for the following entity?


• What are the candidate keys?
• Primary key?

author
name death

birthday description
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Ternary Relationship

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Can We Decompose a Ternary
Relationship?
• 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
• E.g. works-on

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Converting Ternary to binary

• 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

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Converting Ternary to binary

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Weak Entity Set

• Some entity sets in real world naturally depend on some other entity
set
• They can be uniquely identified only if combined with another entity set
• Example:
• section1, section2, … become unique only if you put them into a context, e.g.
csce4350

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Weak Entity Set Notations
Double rectangles for weak entity set
Double diamond for weak entity
relationship
Dashed underscore for discriminator

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Specialization

• A lower-level entity set inherits all the attributes and relationship


participation of the higher-level entity set to which it is linked.
• A lower-level entity set may have additional attributes and
participate in additional relationships

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Specification

• Disjoint
• Overlapping
• Completeness constraint (use double lines)
• 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

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Design Considerations

• Use of entity sets vs. attributes


• Whether we want to keep additional information
• Use of entity sets vs. relationship sets
• Actions among entities are usually represented by relationships
• Binary versus n-ary relationship sets
• N-nary relationships are usually more natural for actions among entity sets
• Weak entity set vs. strong entity set
• Generalization

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Notations

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Notations

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