Lecture 2:

Entity/Relationship modelling

Dr. Peter Chen

http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~chen/

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Teaching/current/Databases/ 1
 Database design lifecycle

• Requirements analysis
– User needs; what must database do?
• Conceptual design
– High-level description; often using E/R model Today

• Logical design
– Translate E/R model into (typically) relational schema
• Schema refinement
– Check schema for redundancies and anomalies
• Physical design/tuning
– Consider typical workloads, and further optimise
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 Today’s lecture

• E/R modelling
– Entities
– Attributes
– Relationships
– Constraints on relationships
• Extended E/R modelling
– Object ideas

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 Conceptual Design

• 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 (business
rules) that hold?
• We can represent this information pictorially in
E/R diagrams (and then map these to a
relational schema later).
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 E/R basics

• An entity is a real-world object that is

distinguishable from other objects
• Each entity has attributes (with domains)
• A particular entity will have a value for each of its
attributes
• An entity type defines a set of entities that have
the same attributes
• An entity set is the collection of all entities of a
particular entity type (at a particular point in time)
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 Entities and attributes

• Entity types are drawn as rectangles, e.g.

Employees

• Attributes are drawn as ovals, and

attached to the entity sets with lines, e.g.
Name
NI dob

Employees

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 Key attributes

• A key attribute of an entity type is an

attribute whose values are distinct for each
entity
• Sometimes several attributes (a composite
attribute) together form a key
– NB: Such a composite should be minimal
• We underline key attributes Name
NI dob

Employees 7
 Relationships

• A relationship type among two or more

entity types defines a set of associations
between entities from those types
– Mathematically, relationship type R
R  E1    En.
• The set of instances of the relationship
type is called the relationship set

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 Relationships in E/R

• Relationship types are represented by

diamonds
• They connect the participating entity types
with straight lines, e.g.
Name dname
NI dob DID budget

Employees Works_in Departments

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 Relationship set diagrams

• Sometimes its useful to represent the

relationship set diagrammatically
r1
e1 d1

e2 r2 d2
e3 r3 d3
e4 d4
r4
e5 d5
… … …

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 Relationship attributes

• Relationships can also have attributes

– NB: A relationship must be uniquely
determined by the entities, without reference
to the relationship attributes

Name dname
NI dob since DID budget

Employees Works_in Departments

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 N-ary relationships

• Although relatively rare, we can have n-ary

relationships, e.g.
Name dname
NI dob since DID budget

Employees Works_in2 Department

address Locations capacity

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 Recursive relationships

• Each entity type in a relationship plays a

particular role, which is associated with a role
name (this is usually suppressed)
• An recursive relationship is when an entity
type plays more than one role in the relationship
type
• In this case the role name is required

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 Recursive relationships in E/R

e.g. name
dob
NI

Employees

supervisor subordinate

Reports-to

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 Constraints on relationship
types
• For example:
– An employee can work in many departments; a
department can have many employees
– In contrast, each department has at most one
manager
• Thus we need to be able to specify the
number of relationship instances that an
entity can participate in.
• For binary relationships the possible ratios
are: 1:1, 1:N, N:1, M:N
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 Cardinality ratios
1:1 1:N

M:N

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 Cardinality ratios in E/R

M N
M:N

N 1
N:1

1 1
1:1

Note: Sometimes this is written using different arrowheads

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 Participation constraints

Every department must have a manager

• This is an example of a participation

constraint
• The participation of an entity set, E, in a
relationship set R is said to be total if every
entity in E participates in at least one
relationship in R. (If not its participation is
said to be partial)
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 Participation in E/R diagrams

• Total participation is displayed as a bold

line between the entity type and the
relationship
– NB. Sometimes this is written as a double line

dname
Name DID budget
NI dob since

1 N
Employees Manages Department

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 Weak entity types

• An entity type may not have sufficient

attributes to form a primary key
• Such an entity type is called a weak entity
type
• A weak entity can only be identified
uniquely by considering the primary key of
another (owner) entity

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 Weak entity types cont.

• Thus the owner and weak entity types

must participate in a 1:N relationship
• Weak entity set must have total
participation in this identifying
relationship set.
pName age
NI Name Cost

1 N
Employees Policy Dependents

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 Extended E/R modelling

• What we’ve seen so far is “classic” E/R

• Over the years a number of features have
been added to the model and the
modelling process
• These features include:
• Sub- and super- • Higher/Lower-level
classes entity sets
• Specialisation • Attribute
• Generalisation inheritance
• Categories • Aggregation
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 ISA hierarchies

• We can devise hierarchies for our entity

types
Name
NI dob
• If we declare
A ISA B, every Employees
A entity is
considered to
hours
be a B entity rate ISA cid

Temp_Emp Contract_Emp

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 Attribute inheritance

• As we’d expect, attributes of superclasses

are inherited by the subclasses.
• Thus: Temp_Emp also has attributes NI,
Name and dob

• In fact, subclasses inherit relationships too

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 Aggregation

• Suppose we have an entity set of Projects

and that each project is sponsored by one
or more departments; thus
since
start dname
budget budget
PID DID

N M
Projects Sponsors Departments

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 Aggregation cont.

• Suppose that employees are assigned to

monitor a sponsorship
• Monitors should be a relationship between
Employees and the Sponsors relationship
• Aggregation allows us to indicate that a
relationship set participates in another
relationship set
• Use dashed box

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 Aggregation cont.
NI name

Employees

Monitors until

since
start dname
PID budget DID budget

N M
Projects Sponsors Departments

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 A Data Model from the
European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)
See http://intact.sourceforge.net/uml/intactCore.gif

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 Summary

You should now understand:

• Database design lifecycle
• Entities and attributes
• Relationships
– Cardinality ratios
– Participation constraints
• Weak entity types
• ISA hierarchies & aggregation
Next lecture: The relational model
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