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What Are Entity Relationship Diagrams

Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) illustrate the logical structure of databases by showing entities, attributes, and relationships. ERDs were developed by Peter Chen in 1976 and have since been refined. An entity represents an object or concept about which information is stored, such as employees, with key attributes uniquely identifying each entity. Relationships connect entities and cardinality specifies the number of instances one entity relates to another.

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70 views

What Are Entity Relationship Diagrams

Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) illustrate the logical structure of databases by showing entities, attributes, and relationships. ERDs were developed by Peter Chen in 1976 and have since been refined. An entity represents an object or concept about which information is stored, such as employees, with key attributes uniquely identifying each entity. Relationships connect entities and cardinality specifies the number of instances one entity relates to another.

Uploaded by

carlregencia
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What are Entity Relationship Diagrams?

Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) illustrate the logical structure of databases.

An ER Diagram

Entity Relationship Diagram Notations

Peter Chen developed ERDs in 1976. Since then Charles Bachman and James Martin have added some sligh refinements to the basic
ERD principles.

Entity
An entity is an object or concept about which you want to store information.
Learn how to edit text on an entity.

Weak Entity
A weak entity is an entity that must defined by a foreign key relationship with another entity as it cannot be uniquely identified by its
own attributes alone.
Learn how to edit text on this object.

Key attribute

A key attribute is the unique, distinguishing characteristic of the entity. For example, an employee's social security number might be
the employee's key attribute.

Multivalued attribute
A multivalued attribute can have more than one value. For example, an employee entity can have multiple skill values.

Derived attribute

A derived attribute is based on another attribute. For example, an employee's monthly salary is based on the employee's annual salary.

Relationships

Relationships illustrate how two entities share information in the database structure.

Learn how to draw relationships:


First, connect the two entities, then drop the relationship notation on the line.

Cardinality

Cardinality specifies how many instances of an entity relate to one instance of another entity.

Ordinality is also closely linked to cardinality. While cardinality specifies the occurences of a relationship, ordinality describes the
relationship as either mandatory or optional. In other words, cardinality specifies the maximum number of relationships and ordinality
specifies the absolute minimum number of relationships.

Click here for more cardinality notations


To learn how to express cardinality in SmartDraw, click here.

Recursive relationship

In some cases, entities can be self-linked. For example, employees can supervise other employees.

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