ER Model

The Entity-Relationship Model
Chapter 2
1
Database Management Systems 3ed, R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke
Motivating Example: Design DB for
B&N Hiring Dudes DB Co.
 Requirements:
 Topic: Books focusing on horse racing
 Customers to browse catalog over the internet
 Order books over the internet
 Order contains: ISBN number, and quantity.
 Shipment of whole order in one shot. If not all books in
stock, then additional copies made.
 For each book, catalog contains: ISBN, title, author, purchase
price, sales price, and year book was published.
 Records for customers are maintained: names and
addresses.
 New customers have to open an account first, and get CID.
 Payment by credit card
HOW???
2
Outline
 Database Design and ER Diagram
 Entities, Attributes, & Entity set
 Relationships and relationship Set
 Additional Features of the ER Model
 Conceptual design with the ER Model
 Conceptual Design for Large Enterprises
 Case Study: Internet Shop
3
Database Design Approach
1. Requirement Collection
2. Requirement Analysis
3. Conceptual Design (Ch. 2)
4. Logical Design (Ch. 3)
5. Physical Implementation (Ch. 8)
6. Tuning & possibly repeating above steps
(Ch. 4, 5, 19)
4
Requirements Analysis
 Understand (in english) what is being asked:

 What data to store in database?
 What application(s) must be built on top of it?
 What operations are most frequent and
corresponding performance requirements?
 Expected changes on current environment?
 Note that this step may be an informal

process of discussion with the customer(s)
5
Conceptual Design
 In this step, develop a high level description of
the data to be stored in DB and their constraints.
 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?
 Represent the database `schema’ in the ER Model
pictorially (ER diagrams).
 Then, map the ER diagram into a relational
schema. 6
Remaining steps in the design
 Logical Design
 Translate ER Diagram to Relations (Ch. 3)
 Physical Implementation
 E.g. Choosing Indexing (Ch. 8)
 Tuning & possibly repeating above steps
 E.g. Normalization (Ch. 19)
 …Other considerations, e.g. applications
(Ch.6-7), security, …
7
Outline
8
Entity-Relationship Data Model
(ER)
 entity: a real-world object such as a student.
 attributes: to describe a particular entity (e.g. name, SS#,
height).
 domain: Each attribute comes from a specified domain (e.g.,
name may be a 20 character string; SS# is a nine-digit integer)
 entity set: a collection of similar entities (i.e., those which are
distinguished using the same set of attributes. E.g. Football
Players
 key: a minimal set of attributes for an entity set. May be a
single attribute (such as SS#) or multiple attributes as a key
("Bob from Accounting"). We will generally designate one such
key as the primary key.
 Relationships between entities: Association between entities
9
ER Diagram - Entities
name
ssn lot
Employees
 An entity set is drawn as a rectangle.

 Attributes are drawn as ovals.
 Attributes which belong to the primary key
are underlined.
10
Outline
11
name
Relationships ssn lot
since Employees
name dname
super- subor-
ssn lot did budget visor dinate
Reports_To
Employees Works_In Departments
 Relationship: Association among two or more entities. E.g.,

Mia works in the Pharmacy department. Ahmad reports to Mia.
 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 є E1, ..., en є En. Example above: E1, E2 == Employees,
Departments. Different types of employee entities working in different
department entities.
 Same entity set could participate in different relationship sets, or in different
“roles” in same set. Example: Reports_To
12
ER Model Basics – Relationships
(cont-d)
since
 Descriptive attribute for relationship

to record information about the Works_In
relationship.
 An instance of a relationship: A
“snapshot” in time of the relationship
set.
123 Feb 08 1
456 2
Jan 09
789 3
Employees Works-in Departments
13
Types of relationships since
name dname
ssn lot did budget
 Consider Works_In:
Employees Works_in Departments
An employee can
work in many
departments; a dept
can have many
employees.
1-to-1 1-to Many Many-to-1 Many-to-Many

One One employee, Different dept can
One employee have different
employee, works_in many works at most employees
one dept departments in one dept 14
Outline
15
Key Constraint
since
name dname
ssn lot did budget
Employees Manages Departments
 Assume each dept has at most one manager, according to

the key constraint on Manages.
 Given a department, we can uniquely identify the
Manages relationship in which it appears
 Key constraint represents a many (depts) to 1 (employee)
 Represented by an arrow
16
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).
• Represented by “bold lines”
• Every did value in Departments table must appear in a row of
the Manages table (with a non-null ssn value!)
since
name dname
ssn lot did budget
Employees Manages Departments
Also every employee Works_In

Also every dept must
must be in a dept have employees
since
17
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.
 Represented by bold boxes around them. Their key is dashed.
name
cost pname age
ssn lot
Employees Policy Dependents
Dependent “pname” is not unique, unless associated with employee sid

18
Question
 How do we represent many to 1, 1 to 1, and

many to many?
started_on since
dname
pid pbudget did budget
Projects Sponsors Departments
Stopped here in MWF section

19
name
ssn lot
ISA (`is a’) Hierarchies Employees
• As in C++, or other PLs, hourly_wages hours_worked ISA

attributes are inherited. contractid
• If we declare A ISA B, every A

Contract_Emps
entity is also considered to be a B Hourly_Emps
entity.
 Reasons for using ISA:
 To add descriptive attributes specific to a subclass.
 To identify (specific sub-class) entitities that participate
in a relationship.
20
name
ssn lot
Other good
Aggregation Employees
examples:
OGC vs RPD,
prog mgrs vs
 Used when we have people mgrs
to model a Monitors until
relationship set
involved in another
relationship set. started_on since
dname
 Aggregation allows us pid pbudget did budget
to treat a relationship
set as an entity set Projects Sponsors Departments
for purposes of
participation in * Aggregation vs. ternary relationship:
(other) relationships.
• Monitors is a distinct relationship,
 Represented by
dashed box. with a descriptive attribute.
• Also, can say that each sponsorship
is monitored by at most one employee.
21
Outline
22
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.
23
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).
24
Entity vs. Attribute (Contd.)
 Works_In4 does not from to
name dname
allow an employee to ssn lot did budget
work in a department
for two or more periods. Employees Works_In4 Departments
 Similar to the problem of

wanting to record several
addresses for an employee:
We want to record name dname
several values of the ssn lot did budget
descriptive attributes
Works_In4 Departments
for each instance of Employees
this relationship.
 Accomplished by from Duration to
introducing new entity set,
Duration.
25
Entity vs. Relationship (1/2)
since dbudget
name dname
ssn lot did budget
Employees Manages2 Departments
 Above ER diagram OK if a manager gets a separate

discretionary budget for each dept.
 What if a manager gets a (one) discretionary budget that
covers all managed depts?
 Redundancy: dbudget stored for each dept managed by manager.
 Misleading: Suggests dbudget associated with department-mgr
combination.
26
Entity vs. Relationship (2/2)
 Fixing the problem:
 Create a new entity and assign “dbudget” to the entity rather than the
realtionship.
 Eliminates the redundancy
 Clear association of “dbudget” to all
name
ssn lot
since dname
Employees did budget
Manages2 Departments
ISA
Managers dbudget
How would we change the ER model to represent

Database Management Systems 3ed, R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke one starting date for managing all departments? 27
Binary vs. Ternary Relationships
name
ssn lot pname age
 If each policy is Employees Covers Dependents
owned by just 1
employee, and Bad design Policies
each dependent
policyid cost
is tied to the
covering policy, ssn
name
lot
pname age
first diagram is Dependents

inaccurate. Employees
 What are the Purchaser

Beneficiary
additional
constraints in the
Better design Policies
2nd diagram?
policyid cost
28
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?
29
name
ssn lot
Aggregation vs Employees
Ternary Monitors until
started_on since
dname
pid pbudget did budget
Projects Sponsors Departments
 Without “until” attribute, we could have a Ternary

relationship.
 But can we say that each sponsorship is monitored
by at most one employee?
30
Outline
31
Case Study: B&N Hiring Dudes DB Co.
 Requirements:
 Books focusing on horse racing
 Customers to browse catalog over the internet
 Order books over the internet
 Order contains: ISBN number, and quantity.
 Shipment of whole order in one shot. If not all books in
stock, then additional copies made.
 For each book, catalog contains: ISBN, title, author, purchase
price, sales price, and year book was published.
 Records for customers are maintained: names and
addresses.
 New customers have to open an account first, and get CID.
 Payment by credit card
32
Case Study (cont-d): Conceptual
Schema
Order_date Ship_Date
qty
Author cardnum
Qty_in_stock
price
title
cname
isbn Yr_publish cid address
Books Orders Customers
How to handle?:
1. Same books in same day (qty), 2. diff books in same day (isbn)
3. Same books on different days  problem (order = cid/isbn).
33
Congratulations!!!!
You have just designed your first

Conceptual Database!
Though not optimal yet 
34
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.
35
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
 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.
36

ER Model

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

ER Model

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Entity-Relationship Model

 Understand (in english) what is being asked:

 Note that this step may be an informal

 An entity set is drawn as a rectangle.

Relationships ssn lot

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

 Descriptive attribute for relationship

1-to-1 1-to Many Many-to-1 Many-to-Many

Employees Manages Departments

 Assume each dept has at most one manager, according to

Employees Manages Departments

Also every employee Works_In

Employees Policy Dependents

Dependent “pname” is not unique, unless associated with employee sid

 How do we represent many to 1, 1 to 1, and

Projects Sponsors Departments

Stopped here in MWF section

ISA (`is a’) Hierarchies Employees

• As in C++, or other PLs, hourly_wages hours_worked ISA

• If we declare A ISA B, every A

 Similar to the problem of

Employees Manages2 Departments

 Above ER diagram OK if a manager gets a separate

How would we change the ER model to represent

first diagram is Dependents

 What are the Purchaser

Ternary Monitors until

Projects Sponsors Departments

 Without “until” attribute, we could have a Ternary

Books Orders Customers

You have just designed your first

You might also like