Modeling

 A database can be modeled as:

◦ a collection of entities,
◦ relationship among entities.
 An entity is an object that exists and is
distinguishable from other objects.
◦ Example: specific person, company, event, plant
 Entities have attributes
◦ Example: people have names and addresses
 An entity set is a set of entities of the same
type that share the same properties.
◦ Example: set of all persons, companies, trees,
holidays

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 Entity Sets customer and loan
customer_id customer_ customer_ customer_ loan_ amount
name street city number

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 Relationship Sets
 A relationship is an association among several
entities
Example:
Hayes depositor A-102
customer entity relationship set account entity
 A relationship set is a mathematical relation
among n  2 entities, each taken from entity sets
{(e1, e2, … en) | e1  E1, e2  E2, …, en  En}

where (e1, e2, …, en) is a relationship

◦ Example:
(Hayes, A-102)  depositor

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Relationship Set borrower

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 Relationship Sets (Cont.)
 An attribute can also be property of a relationship set.
 For instance, the depositor relationship set between entity sets
customer and account may have the attribute access-date

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 Degree of a Relationship Set
 Refers to number of entity sets that participate in a
relationship set.
 Relationship sets that involve two entity sets are
binary (or degree two). Generally, most relationship
sets in a database system are binary.
 Relationship sets may involve more than two entity
sets.
Example: Suppose employees of a bank may have jobs
(responsibilities) at multiple branches, with different jobs at
different branches. Then there is a ternary relationship set
between entity sets employee, job, and branch

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E-RDiagram with a Ternary
Relationship

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 Cardinality Constraints on Ternary Relationship

 We allow at most one arrow out of a ternary (or greater degree)

relationship to indicate a cardinality constraint
E.g. an arrow from works_on to job indicates each employee
works on at most one job at any branch.
 If there is more than one arrow, there are two ways of defining the
meaning.
◦ E.g a ternary relationship R between A, B and C with arrows to B and C
could mean
1. each A entity is associated with a unique entity from B and C or
2. each pair of entities from (A, B) is associated with a unique C entity,
and each pair (A, C) is associated with a unique B
◦ Each alternative has been used in different formalisms
◦ To avoid confusion we outlaw more than one arrow

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 Attributes
 An entity is represented by a set of attributes, that is
descriptive properties possessed by all members of an
entity set.
Example:
customer = (customer_id, customer_name,
customer_street, customer_city )
loan = (loan_number, amount )

 Domain – the set of permitted values for each attribute

 Attribute types:
◦ Simple and composite attributes.
◦ Single-valued and multi-valued attributes
 Example: multivalued attribute: phone_numbers
◦ Derived attributes
 Can be computed from other attributes
 Example: age, given date_of_birth
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Composite Attributes

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 Mapping Cardinality Constraints
 Express the number of entities to which another
entity can be associated via a relationship set.
 Most useful in describing binary relationship sets.
 For a binary relationship set the mapping
cardinality must be one of the following types:
◦ One to one
◦ One to many
◦ Many to one
◦ Many to many

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 Mapping Cardinalities

One to one One to many

Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any
elements in the other set
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 Mapping Cardinalities

Many to one Many to many

Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any
elements in the other set
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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
◦ Customer_id is candidate key of customer
◦ account_number is candidate key of account
 Although several candidate keys may
exist, one of the candidate keys is
selected to be the primary key.It does
not allow NULL values.

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 Keys for Relationship Sets
 The combination of primary keys of the
participating entity sets forms a super key of a
relationship set.
◦ (customer_id, account_number) is the super key of
depositor
 Must consider the mapping cardinality of the
relationship set when deciding what are the
candidate keys
 Need to consider semantics of relationship set
in selecting the primary key in case of more
than one candidate key

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Example

 Stud_No is primary key for student table

 (Stud_no,Course No) is candidate key for student_course table

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 E-R Diagrams

 Rectangles represent entity sets.

 Diamonds represent relationship sets.
 Lines link attributes to entity sets and entity sets to relationship sets.
 Ellipses represent attributes
 Double ellipses represent multivalued attributes.
 Dashed ellipses denote derived attributes.
 Underline indicates primary key attributes

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E-R Diagram With Composite, Multivalued, and Derived
Attributes

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Relationship Sets with Attributes

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 Roles
 Entity sets of a relationship need not be distinct
 The labels “manager” and “worker” are called roles; they
specify how employee entities interact via the works_for
relationship set.
 Roles are indicated in E-R diagrams by labeling the lines that
connect diamonds to rectangles.
 Role labels are optional, and are used to clarify semantics of the
relationship

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 Cardinality Constraints
 We express cardinality constraints by drawing either a directed
line (), signifying “one,” or an undirected line (—), signifying
“many,” between the relationship set and the entity set.
One-to-one relationship:
◦ A customer is associated with at most one loan via the relationship
borrower
◦ A loan is associated with at most one customer via borrower

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One-To-Many Relationship

 In the one-to-many relationship a loan is

associated with at most one customer via
borrower, a customer is associated with several
(including 0) loans via borrower

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Many-To-One Relationships

 In a many-to-one relationship a loan is

associated with several (including 0) customers
via borrower, a customer is associated with at
most one loan via borrower

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 Many-To-Many Relationship
 A customer is associated with several
(possibly 0) loans via borrower
 A loan is associated with several (possibly 0)
customers via borrower

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 Participation of an Entity Set in a Relationship Set

 Total participation (indicated by double line): every entity in the entity set
participates in at least one relationship in the relationship set
 E.g. participation of loan in borrower is total
 every loan must have a customer associated to it via borrower
 Partial participation: some entities may not participate in any relationship in the
relationship set
 Example: participation of customer in borrower is partial

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Alternative Notation for Cardinality
Limits
 Cardinality limits can also express participation constraints
 The relationship borrower is many-to-one from customer to loan

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 Weak Entity Sets
 An entity set that does not have a primary key is referred to as
a weak entity set.
 The existence of a weak entity set depends on the existence of
a identifying entity set
◦ it must relate to the identifying entity set via a total, one-to-many
relationship set from the identifying to the weak entity set
◦ Identifying relationship depicted using a double diamond
 The discriminator (or partial key) of a weak entity set is the
set of attributes that distinguishes among all the entities of a
weak entity set.
 The primary key of a weak entity set is formed by the primary
key of the strong entity set on which the weak entity set is
existence dependent, plus the weak entity set’s discriminator.

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 Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)
 We depict a weak entity set by double rectangles.
 We underline the discriminator of a weak entity set with a
dashed line.
 payment_number – discriminator of the payment entity set
 Primary key for payment – (loan_number, payment_number)

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 More Weak Entity Set Examples
 In a university, a course is a strong entity and a
course_offering can be modeled as a weak entity
 The discriminator of course_offering would be
semester (including year) and section_number (if there
is more than one section)
 If we model course_offering as a strong entity we
would model course_number as an attribute.
Then the relationship with course would be implicit
in the course_number attribute

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 Extended E-R Features: Specialization
 Top-down design process; we designate subgroupings
within an entity set that are distinctive from other entities
in the set.
 These subgroupings become lower-level entity sets that
have attributes or participate in relationships that do not
apply to the higher-level entity set.
 Depicted by a triangle component labeled ISA (E.g.
customer “is a” person).
 Attribute inheritance – a lower-level entity set inherits
all the attributes and relationship participation of the
higher-level entity set to which it is linked.

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Specialization Example

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 Extended ER Features:
Generalization
 A bottom-up design process – combine a number of
entity sets that share the same features into a higher-level
entity set.
 Specialization and generalization are simple inversions of
each other; they are represented in an E-R diagram in the
same way.
 The terms specialization and generalization are used
interchangeably.

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 Specialization and Generalization (Cont.)
 Can have multiple specializations of an entity set
based on different features.
 E.g. permanent_employee vs. temporary_employee, in
addition to officer vs. secretary vs. teller
 Each particular employee would be
◦ a member of one of permanent_employee or
temporary_employee,
◦ and also a member of one of officer, secretary, or teller
 The ISA relationship also referred to as superclass
- subclass relationship

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Design Constraints on a Specialization/Generalization

 Constraint on which entities can be members of a

given lower-level entity set.
◦ condition-defined
 Example: all customers over 65 years are members of senior-
citizen entity set; senior-citizen ISA person.
◦ user-defined
 Constraint on whether or not entities may belong to
more than one lower-level entity set within a single
generalization.
◦ Disjoint
 an entity can belong to only one lower-level entity set
 Noted in E-R diagram by writing disjoint next to the ISA triangle
◦ Overlapping
 an entity can belong to more than one lower-level entity set

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Design Constraints on a Specialization/Generalization
(Cont.)

 Completeness constraint -- specifies

whether or not an entity in the higher-level
entity set must belong to at least one of the
lower-level entity sets within a generalization.
◦ 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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Aggregation

 Consider the ternary relationship works_on, which we saw earlier

 Suppose we want to record managers for tasks performed by an
employee at a branch
Relationship sets works_on and manages represent overlapping information
Every manages relationship corresponds to a works_on relationship
However, some works_on relationships may not correspond to any
manages relationships
So we can’t discard the works_on relationship
Eliminate this redundancy via aggregation
Treat relationship as an abstract entity
Allows relationships between relationships
Abstraction of relationship into new entity
Without introducing redundancy, the following diagram represents:
An employee works on a particular job at a particular branch
An employee, branch, job combination may have an associated manager

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E-R Diagram With Aggregation

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Summary of Symbols Used in E-R Notation

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Summary of Symbols (Cont.)

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Example
Construct an E-R diagram for a car
insurance company whose customers
own one or more cars each. Each car has
associated with it zero to any number of
recorded accidents

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Answer

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Example
Consider a relational table with a single record for each registered
student with the following attributes.
1. Registration_Number: Unique registration number for each
registered student
2. UID: Unique Identity number, unique at the national level for each
citizen
3. BankAccount_Number: Unique account number at the bank. A
student can have multiple accounts or joint accounts. This
attributes stores the primary account number
4. Name: Name of the Student
5. Hostel_Room: Room number of the hostelWhich of the
following options is INCORRECT?

(A) BankAccount_Number is a candidate key.

(B) Registration_Number can be a primary key.
(C) UID is a candidate key if all students are from the same
country.
(D) If S is a superkey such that S ∩ UID is NULL then S ∪ UID is
also a superkey.

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Answer
 Option (A)

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E-R Diagram for a Banking Enterprise

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Key example
 Given an instance of the STUDENTS
relation as shown below:

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Answer
 X should not be 19

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