CREATING AN ENTITY

RELATIONSHIP
DIAGRAM
5 MAJOR PARTS TO CREATE AN ERD’s
 Entities
 Attributes
 Primary Key
 Relationships
 Cardinality
 Student

ENTITY
INSTANCE
Student Student
School ID
FirstName
Primary Key – an attribute or group of attributes that uniquely
identifies an instance of the entity, it is a special attribute that MUST be
unique.
 Relationship – describes how one or more entities interact
with each other.
Student Student Phone_Number

FirstName

Phone_Number
Cardinality – the count of instances that are allowed or more
necessary between entity relationships
Student Student Phone_Number

FirstName

Phone_Number
 Cardinality (Minimum/Maximum)

• Minimum Cardinality represents the minimum

number of instances that are required in the relationship.
Fewest number of rows we need for relationship

• Maximum Cardinality represents the number of

instances that are allowed.
Cannot exceed a certain number of rows in our relatioship
Mandatory vs. One vs. Many
Optional refers
Crow’s Foot Notation
refers to
to MINIMUM MAXIMUM

SYMBOL MEANING

ONE – MANDATORY

MANY – MANDATORY

ONE – OPTIONAL

MANY - OPTIONAL
Advanced Syntax
• Independent Entity - is an entity that can exist without the help of another
entity
• Dependent Entity - There are situations when a child entity does require
attributes from the parent entity to uniquely identify an instance.
• Intersection Entity - It exists in order to capture some information about
the relationship between two other entities.
Validating an ERD
• Creating ERDs is pretty tough. It takes a lot
of experience to draw ERDs well, and there
are not many black-and white rules to help
guide you.
Design Guidelines

are not rules to be followed; rather, they are

“best practices” that often lead to better
quality diagrams.
Normalization
Once you have created your ERD, there is a
technique called normalization that can help
analysts validate the models that they have
drawn.