ER Model

Dr. Jenila Livingston L.M.

SCSE

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 Entity-Relationship Modelling
1. Entities
2. Attributes
3. Relationships
4. Constraints
 Keys
 Mapping Cardinality
5. ER Notations
6. Roles
7. Participation
8. Strong & Weak Entity Sets

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 Entity-Relationship (ER) Modeling.
 1976 proposed by Peter Chen
 ER diagram is widely used in database design

 Represent conceptual level of a database system

 Describe things/entities and their relationships in high level

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 ER Modeling.
 ER Modeling is a top-down approach to
database design.
 Entity Relationship (ER) Diagram
 A detailed, logical representation of the entities,
associations and data elements for an organization
or business
 Notation uses three main constructs
 Data entities
Chen Model &
 Relationships Crow’s Foot Model

 Attributes

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 ER Diagrams

 Several ER diagramming techniques have been proposed over the years:

 Chen’s notation - 1976
 IDEF1X (NIST) - 1993
 Crow’s feet (Barker, Palmer, Ellis, et al.) – 1981
 UML (Booch, Jacobson and Rumbaugh) – 1990’s
 Others…

 The authors current version is somewhat UML-like, but previously used Chen’s
notation.

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 Chen Notation

Association
between the
instances of one or
more entity types

EntityName Verb Phrase AttributeName

Person, place, object, event named property or

or concept about which data characteristic of an
is to be maintained entity

Represents a set or collection of

objects in the real world that
share the same properties

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Crow’s Foot Notation

Entity Attribute Relationship

EntityName
EntityName Verb phrase

List of
Attributes

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 1. Entities
 Examples of entities:
 Person: EMPLOYEE, STUDENT, PATIENT
 Place: STORE, WAREHOUSE
 Object: MACHINE, PRODUCT, CAR
 Event: SALE,REGISTRATION, RENEWAL
 Concept: ACCOUNT, COURSE

 Guidelines for naming and defining entity types:

 An entity type name is a singular noun
 An entity type should be descriptive and specific
 An entity name should be concise
 Event entity types should be named for the result of the event, not
the activity or process of the event.

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 2. Attributes

 Example of entity types and associated attributes:

STUDENT: Student_ID, Student_Name, Home_Address,
Phone_Number, Major

 Guidelines for naming attributes:

 An attribute name is a noun.
 An attribute name should be unique
 To make an attribute name unique and clear, each attribute name
should follow a standard format
 Similar attributes of different entity types should use similar but
distinguishing names.

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 Attributes

 The set of permitted values for an attribute is call the domain of that attribute.

 Attributes can be one of several types:

 Simple (i.e., atomic) – height in inches, weight in ounces, last-name
 Composite – name, address
 Single-valued – date of birth, name
 Multi-valued – phone-numbers, dependents, hobbies
 Derived – “age” is derived, or rather, computed from “date-of-birth”

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 Composite Attributes

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 Attributes - Chenn

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 Attributes - UML

composite
customer

simple ID
name
first
middle
last
address
strieet
number
name
apt-number
city multi-valued
derived state
zip-code
{ phone_number }
date-of-birth
age ()

 Notes:
 In many applications the terms are much more ambiguous (e.g., function designators)
 An ER diagram is typically accompanied by a document that defines all the terms
 Much harder to do than it appears (e.g., what is an “orbit” for a satellite?)
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 3. Relationships

 Associations between instances of one or more entity types that is of interest

 Given a name that describes its function.
• relationship name is an active or a passive verb.

Relationship name:
writes

Author Book

An author writes one or more books

A book can be written by one or more authors.

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 Relationships

Lecturer handles Class

Member Searches Books

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 Relationships

since
name dname
ssn lot did budget

Employees Works_In Departments

 Relationship: Association among two or more entities. E.g., Bob Smith

works in Pharmacy department.
 relationships can have their own attributes.
 Verb or Verb phrases (e.g., works_at, enrolled_in, etc)
 Relationship Set: Collection of similar relationships.
 An n-ary relationship set R relates n entity sets E1 ... En ; each
relationship in R involves entities e1  E1, ..., en  En

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 Degree of Relationships

 Degree: number of entity types that participate in a relationship

 Three cases
 Unary: between two instances of one entities
 Binary: between the instances of two entities
 Ternary: among the instances of three entities
 N-nary: among the instances of more than three entities

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E-R Diagram with a Ternary Relationship

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 Relationship

 An attribute can also be property of a relationship set.

 For instance, the advisor relationship set between entity sets
instructor and student may have the attribute date which
tracks when the student started being associated with the
advisor

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 Relationship Sets with Attributes

access-date

customer
account
ID depositor number
name balance
strieet
city

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 4. Constraints

 Keys
 Cardinalities

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 Keys

 Entities and relationships are distinguishable using various keys

 A key is a combination of one or more attributes, e.g., social-security
number, combination of name and social-security number.
 A primary key of an entity set is specified in an ER diagram by
underlining the key attributes.

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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 Mapping Cardinalities

 The mapping cardinality of a relationship set expresses the number of

entities to which one entity can be associated via the relationship set.

 Most useful in describing binary relationship sets.

 For a binary relationship there are four types:

 One to one
 One to many
 Many to one
 Many to many

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 Cardinalities Examples

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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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 Mapping Cardinalities
affect Attribute Placement

 In the banking enterprise, access-date could be an attribute of account

instead of a relationship attribute if each account can have only one
customer, i.e., if the relationship is one-to-many.

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 Cardinality Constraints

 Cardinality constraints are indicated by drawing a directed line (),

signifying “one,” or an undirected line (—), signifying “many,” between
the relationship and the entity.

 If borrower were a one-to-one relationship:

 A customer would be associated with at most one loan
 n loan would be associated with at most one customer

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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 One-To-Many Relationship

 If borrower were a one-to-many relationship from customer to loan, then

a customer would be associated with zero or more one loans, and a
loan would be associated with at most one customer.

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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 Many-To-One Relationships

 If borrower were a many-to-one relationship from customer to loan, then

a loan would be associated with zero or more customers, and a
customer would be associated with at most one loan.

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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 Many-To-Many Relationship

 If borrower were a many-to-many relationship then a customer would be

associated with zero or more loans, and a loan would be associated with
zero of more customers.

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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5. ER NOTATIONS – Chenn Model

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 ER Notations

1. Rectangles divided into two parts represent entity sets.

The first part, contains the name of the entity set. The
second part contains the names of all the attributes of the
entity set.
2. Diamonds represent relationship sets.
3. Undivided rectangles represent the attributes of a
relationship set.
Attributes that are part of the primary key are underlined.
4. Lines link entity sets to relationship sets.
5. Dashed lines link attributes of a relationship set to the
relationship set.
6. Double lines indicate total participation of an entity in a
relationship set.
7. Double diamonds represent identifying relationship sets
linked to weak entity sets
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 ER Notations - Revised

 Rectangles - entity sets

 Diamonds - relationship sets
 Lines - connect attributes to entity sets, and entity sets to relationship sets.
 Underlined Attributes – primary key attributes

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

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 ER Notations

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 ER Notations

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 6. Roles

 The function that an entity plays in a relationship is called

its role.
 Entity sets of a relationship need not be distinct
 Each occurrence of an entity set plays a “role” in the relationship
 The labels “course_id” and “prereq_id” are called roles.

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 Roles

Worker and Manager both

are 2 roles of Employee

1. Director
2. Manager
3. Secretary
4. Worker

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 7. Participation of an Entity Set
in a Relationship Set

 If every entity in an entity set must participate in a relationship set, then

that entity set is said to have total participation in the relationship;
indicated by a double-line and a double-diamond.

customer
loan
ID borrower number
name amount
strieet
city

 If participation in a relationship is optional for some entities then that

entity set is said to have partial participation in the relationship.
 All elements of loan participate in customer

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 8. Strong Entity Sets

 For most entity sets, a primary key is specified in terms of its immediate
attributes.

 Such an entity set is referred to as a strong entity set.

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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.
 They are dependent on another entity

 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.

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 Weak Entity Sets, Cont.

 In such a case, the (weak) entity typically has a subset of attributes,

called a discriminator (or partial key), that distinguishes among all
entities of the weak entity set associated with one identifying entity.

 In such a case, a primary key for the weak entity set can be constructed
with two parts:
 primary key of the strong entity set on which the weak entity set is
existence dependent
 The weak entity set’s discriminator

 A weak entity set is typically associated with an identifying entity

set (which is usually strong) via a total, one-to-many relationship.

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 Weak Entity Sets (Cont.)

 A weak entity set is represented by double rectangles.

 The discriminator is underlined with a dashed line.

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 More Weak Entity Set Examples

 In a university, a course is a strong entity and a section can be modeled as

a weak entity.

course
section
ID sec-course sec_id
title semester
credits year

 The discriminator of section would be sec-id, semester and year.

 If section were modeled as a strong entity then it would have id as an

attribute; the relationship with course would be implicit in the id attribute.

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 E-R Diagram for a Banking
Enterprise (Chen’s Notation)

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 E-R Diagram
for a University

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 Exercise -1

Draw an ER diagram that best represents the

following situation. There are three types of
accounts in a bank, with these attributes:

• Checking: Acct-no, Date-opened, Balance,

Service-charge
• Savings: Acct-no, Date-opened, Balance,
Interest-rate
• Loan: Acct-no, Date-opened, Balance, Acct-limit

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 Exercise 2

A company database needs to store information about employees

(identified by ssn, with salary and phone as attributes), departments
(identified by dno, with dname and budget as attributes), and
children of employees (with name and age as attributes).
Employees work in departments; each department is managed by
an employee

Draw an ER diagram that captures this information and the following.

• Identify the primary keys and foreign keys
• Apply all types of attributes wherever it can be used.
• Apply mapping cardinalities and participation constraints

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 Thank You!

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