Lecture 3

Conceptual Data Base Design (ER Modeling)

Outline
 Basic concepts of E-R model
The entity relationship(E-R) model is :
A high-level(conceptual) data model

It perceives the mini-world as a collection of basic objects

called entities.

It also contains the descriptions of entities called attributes and

the relationship between/among the entities

ER Diagram is a graphical representation of a Entity-

Relationship Model.
Cont’d…
E-R modeling is mainly used to create the conceptual
schema for the database from the collected system
specifications.
This process is called the conceptual design
The E-R model is DBMS independent
E/R Diagram notation
Cont’d…
 Entity
An entity is an object that exists and which is distinguishable from
other objects.
Can be a person, a place, an object, an event, or a concept

Entity Representation in an E-R Diagram

Cont’d…
An entity type defines a collection of entities that have the same
attributes

An entity instance is a single item in this collection

An entity set is a set of entity instances

Example:
Entity type: STUDENT
Entity instance: Student with ID number AAU021
Entity set: Collection of all students
Attributes in ER diagram

Attributes of the STUDENT Entity Type

Cont’d…
A particular instance of an attribute is called a value.

For example, “Employee Id” and “Name” are the attributes of

the “EMPLOYEES” entity set; and “Jones” is one value of the
attribute “Name”.

The domain of an attribute is the collection of all possible

values an attribute can have. The domain of “Name” is a
character string
 Cont’d…

Attributes can be classified as identifiers or descriptors.

Identifiers: more commonly called keys, uniquely identify an instance

of an entity.

Example: “Employee Id” uniquely identifies an employee entity from

the entity set.

Descriptor: describes a non-unique characteristic of an entity instance.

Example: “Name” is a descriptor for the “EMPLOYEES” entity set.

 Types of attributes
Simple

Composite

single-valued

multi-valued

Stored and

Derived attributes
Simple vs composite attributes
 Single-Valued VS Multi-Valued attributes

Single-valued attributes have a single value for an entity instance.

Examples: Dob, Reg. No

Multi-valued attributes, on the other hand, may have more than one
value for an entity instance

Denoted with a double-lined ellipse

Example

Languages: Stores the names of the languages that a student speak

 Derived Attributes VS Stored

The value of a derived attribute can be determined by

analyzing other attributes.
Denoted with a dashed ellipse
Example:
Age: Can derived from the current date and the attribute Date
Of Birth
An attribute whose value cannot be derived from the values of
other attributes is called a stored attribute
 Relationships

Relationships are associations between one or more entity

types.
A relationship type is represented by diamond connected to
relating entities by lines

A relationship should have a name , an optionality (optional or

mandatory) and a cardinality.

Examples: Customer “has” Account

 Degree of a relationships

The degree of a relationship : is the number of entity types

that participate in a relationship.

There are 3 common relationships:

1. Unary (degree one)

2. Binary (degree two)

3. Ternary (degree three)

Cont’d…
Unary (degree 1) :An association between two instances of the same
entity type
R є E1 x E1
E.g. An employee supervises another employee
 Binary Relationship

Binary (degree 2) – Most relationship sets in a DB System are binary .

An association between two different entity types

R є E1 x E2

E.g. Customer has bank Account

 Ternary Relationship

An association among three different entity types

R є E1 x E2 x E3

E.g. A bank employee who has a specific job in a bank branch

INITIAL ER DIAGRAM FOR COMPANY
 Structural constraints
Relationship types usually have certain constraints that limit the
possible combinations of entities that may participate in the
corresponding relationship set.

 These constraints are determined from the mini world situation

that the relationships represent.
Cont’d…
 Cardinality ratio
The cardinality of a relationship defines the number of instances

of one entity type that can be associated with instances of

another entity type

The maximum cardinality of a relationship defines the
maximum number of instances of one entity type that can be
associated with instances of another entity type
 Types of relationships
One –to one
One –to-many(vice versa)
Many –to -many

Relationship Types Based on Maximum Cardinality

 Cont’d…
How do you know the maximum cardinality between two entity
types?

Questions:
Q1. Can an instance of X be associated with more than one
instance of Y?
Q2. Can an instance of Y be associated with more than one
instance of X?
The 2 questions above have 4 possible answers. Those answers
determine the type of maximum cardinalities
Cont’d…
Question 1 Question 2 Types of maximum cardinality
Yes Yes Many-to-Many
Yes No Many –to-One
No Yes One –to-Many
No No One –to-One
 One to One Relationship
An entity in X is associated with at most one entity in Y
and vice-versa.

Example: each passenger has his own Ticket

 One to Many Relationship
 An entity in X is associated with any number of entities in Y.
But an entity in Y can associate with at most one entity in X
 E.g. A department contains many employees who work under
it
 Many to One Relationship
An entity in X is associated with at most one entity in Y. But an
entity in Y can be associated with any number of entities in X.

 E.g. Student and Guide

 Many to Many Relationship

An entity in X is associated with any number(zero or

more) of entities in Y ,and an entity in Y is associated
with any number (zero or more ) of entities in X
 Relationship Cardinalities
Mandatory Cardinalities: The entity must participate in another
entity.(crow’s foot notation)

Optional Cardinalities: The entity has the option to participate in

another entity.
Cont’d…

Relation types based on minimum cardinality

Crow’s foot notation
 Participation constraint
Participation constraint is defined as the minimum number of
instances of one entity type that must be associated with each
instance of another entity type
There are 2 types of participation constraints:

1.Total participation

2.Partial participation
 Total Participation
In total participation , each entity in the entity set occurs in at
least one relationship in the relationship set
The example below shows that the participation of the entity set
Department Manages is total . This is because every department
must have a manager .
 Partial participation

In partial participation , some entities (not all entities) in the entity set occurs
in the relationship in the relationship set.
Example : EMPLOYEE in the MANAGES relationship type. we do not expect
every employee to manage a department, so the participation of EMPLOYEE in
the MANAGES relationship type is partial(some or "part of the set of" employee
entities are related to a department entity via MANAGES, but not necessarily
all) .
Cont’d…
A strong entity type exists independent of other entity types. They have their
own primary keys.
A weak entity type is an entity type that doesn’t have a primary key of its own.
It depends on
another entity type called the owner or identifying entity type to be uniquely
identified
It needs Foreign keys in conjunction with its attributes to create a primary key
A weak entity type always has a total participation constraint with respect to
its identifying relationship.
Cont’d…
 Cont’d…
From the previous slide we can see that Dependent is a weak
entity type. It is not an object of interest to be stored in the
database but it should be stored because of the existence of
another entity type – the Employee – which it is related with
Employee is the owner or the identifying entity type
Dependent is described by the dependent’s first name , last name and birth
date
It is related with the owner entity type via the identifying relationship type
HAS
 Cont’d…

Exercise
A. Construct an E-R diagram for a hospital with a set of patients and a set of
medical doctors.
Associate with each patient a log of the various tests and examinations
conducted.

Assignment
B. Construct appropriate tables for the above ER Diagram
 Construct full ER diagram for Company
 Enhanced entity relationship(EER)
Introduction
 Since the late 1970 there has been an increase in the emergence of
new database applications, such as GIS, Multimedia databases,
Mobile databases ,etc. with more demanding requirements

Basic concepts of the ER model are not sufficient to represent the

requirements of the newer, more complex applications
Cont’d…
To represent these requirements additional ‘semantic’
modeling concepts are needed.

These semantic concepts are incorporated into the original ER

model and became Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) model

EER diagrams are similar to the class diagrams used in the OO

model.
 Concepts of EER
The EER model includes all the concepts used in the ER model:
◦ Entity types
◦ Attributes
◦ Relationship types

In addition, the EER model includes the following concepts,

which come from the OO model:
◦ Super class/subclass relationship

◦ Attributes inheritance

◦ Specialization and Generalization

Cont’d…
Super class: is an entity type that includes distinct subgroups
with their own unique attributes that should be represented in
the model.
Subclass: is an entity type that is a member of the super class
with its own distinct role. Or it is any subgroup of the Super
class.
Cont’d…
The relationship between a super class and any of its subclasses
is called the super class/subclass relationship.
Attribute inheritance: an entity in a subclass may posses the
attributes of the super class and other attributes specific to itself.
 Super class and Subclass Relationships

An entity type may have additional meaningful sub grouping of

its entities.

Example

Employee may be further grouped into:

SECRETARY,ENGINEER,MANAGER,TECHNICHIAN,SALARIED_EMP
LOYEE,HOURLY_EMPLOYEE

Every instance in a subclass is a member of super class and

shares its attributes
 Super class/Subclass relationship notation

.
Super class/Subclass relationship example
University Example of Super class/Subclass
 Generalization and Specialization

Specialization and generalization are two basic concepts

that help us to recognize possibilities that are enabled by
Super class/Subclass models in the real world.
They serve as conceptual models for development of
Super class/Subclass relationships
Cont’d…
Specialization and Generalization are inverses of each other.

Specialization => Deriving subclasses from a super class

Generalization => Taking common attributes from the

Super class
 Specialization
A Specialization is the process of defining a set of subclasses of a super class by
identifying their distinguishing attributes.

The specialization of an entity type allows us to do the

following:
Define a set of subclasses of an entity type

Establish additional attributes with subclasses

Establish additional relationship types between some subclasses and

other entity types or other subclasses.
Specialization - example
.
 Generalization
Generalization is the process of defining a super class from two
or more subclasses by identifying common attributes of those
subclasses.
Generalization can be considered as the reverse of specialization.
Example
We can view EMPLOYEE as a generalization of SECRETARY,
TECHNICIAN, and ENGINEER
Cont’d…
Entities before Generalization
 Cont’d…

Super classes and subclasses after generalization

Alternative notations
Alternative notations
UML Class Diagrams: a class (similar to an entity type in ER) is
displayed as a box includes three sections:

The top section gives the class name (similar to entity type name);

the middle section includes the attributes;

the last section includes operations that can be applied to individual

objects (similar to individual entities in an entity set) of the class.