CHAPTER

6
Database Design using the E-R
Model

Solutions for the Practice Exercises of Chapter 6

Practice Exercises

6.1 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. Each insurance policy covers one or more cars and has one
or more premium payments associated with it. Each payment is for a particular
period of time, and has an associated due date, and the date when the payment
was received.
6.2 Consider a database that includes the entity sets student, course, and section
from the university schema and that additionally records the marks that students
receive in different exams of different sections.

a. Construct an E-R diagram that models exams as entities and uses a ternary
relationship as part of the design.
b. Construct an alternative E-R diagram that uses only a binary relationship
between student and section. Make sure that only one relationship exists
between a particular student and section pair, yet you can represent the
marks that a student gets in different exams.

6.3 Design an E-R diagram for keeping track of the scoring statistics of your favorite
sports team. You should store the matches played, the scores in each match, the
players in each match, and individual player scoring statistics for each match.
Summary statistics should be modeled as derived attributes with an explanation
as to how they are computed.
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22 Chapter 6 Database Design using the E-R Model

A RA

B R C B RB E RC C

(a) (b)

RAB A RAC

B RBC C

(c)

Figure 6.29 Representation of a ternary relationship using binary relationships.

6.4 Consider an E-R diagram in which the same entity set appears several times,
with its attributes repeated in more than one occurrence. Why is allowing this
redundancy a bad practice that one should avoid?
6.5 An E-R diagram can be viewed as a graph. What do the following mean in terms
of the structure of an enterprise schema?
a. The graph is disconnected.
b. The graph has a cycle.
6.6 Consider the representation of the ternary relationship of Figure 6.29a using
the binary relationships illustrated in Figure 6.29b (attributes not shown).
a. Show a simple instance of E, A, B, C, RA , RB , and RC that cannot corre-
spond to any instance of A, B, C, and R.
b. Modify the E-R diagram of Figure 6.29b to introduce constraints that will
guarantee that any instance of E, A, B, C, RA , RB , and RC that satisfies the
constraints will correspond to an instance of A, B, C, and R.
c. Modify the preceding translation to handle total participation constraints
on the ternary relationship.
6.7 A weak entity set can always be made into a strong entity set by adding to its
attributes the primary-key attributes of its identifying entity set. Outline what
sort of redundancy will result if we do so.
 Practice Exercise 23

6.8 Consider a relation such as sec course, generated from a many-to-one relation-
ship set sec course. Do the primary and foreign key constraints created on the
relation enforce the many-to-one cardinality constraint? Explain why.
6.9 Suppose the advisor relationship set were one-to-one. What extra constraints
are required on the relation advisor to ensure that the one-to-one cardinality
constraint is enforced?
6.10 Consider a many-to-one relationship R between entity sets A and B. Suppose
the relation created from R is combined with the relation created from A. In
SQL, attributes participating in a foreign key constraint can be null. Explain
how a constraint on total participation of A in R can be enforced using not null
constraints in SQL.
6.11 In SQL, foreign key constraints can reference only the primary key attributes of
the referenced relation or other attributes declared to be a superkey using the
unique constraint. As a result, total participation constraints on a many-to-many
relationship set (or on the “one” side of a one-to-many relationship set) cannot
be enforced on the relations created from the relationship set, using primary
key, foreign key, and not null constraints on the relations.
a. Explain why.
b. Explain how to enforce total participation constraints using complex
check constraints or assertions (see Section 4.4.8). (Unfortunately, these
features are not supported on any widely used database currently.)
6.12 Consider the following lattice structure of generalization and specialization (at-
tributes not shown).

X Y

A B C

For entity sets A, B, and C, explain how attributes are inherited from the higher-
level entity sets X and Y . Discuss how to handle a case where an attribute of X
has the same name as some attribute of Y .
6.13 An E-R diagram usually models the state of an enterprise at a point in time.
Suppose we wish to track temporal changes, that is, changes to data over time.
For example, Zhang may have been a student between September 2015 and
May 2019, while Shankar may have had instructor Einstein as advisor from May
2018 to December 2018, and again from June 2019 to January 2020. Similarly,
24 Chapter 6 Database Design using the E-R Model

attribute values of an entity or relationship, such as title and credits of course,

salary, or even name of instructor, and tot cred of student, can change over time.
One way to model temporal changes is as follows: We define a new data type
called valid time, which is a time interval, or a set of time intervals. We then
associate a valid time attribute with each entity and relationship, recording the
time periods during which the entity or relationship is valid. The end time of an
interval can be infinity; for example, if Shankar became a student in September
2018, and is still a student, we can represent the end time of the valid time in-
terval as infinity for the Shankar entity. Similarly, we model attributes that can
change over time as a set of values, each with its own valid time.
a. Draw an E-R diagram with the student and instructor entities, and the ad-
visor relationship, with the above extensions to track temporal changes.
b. Convert the E-R diagram discussed above into a set of relations.
It should be clear that the set of relations generated is rather complex, leading
to difficulties in tasks such as writing queries in SQL. An alternative approach,
which is used more widely, is to ignore temporal changes when designing the
E-R model (in particular, temporal changes to attribute values), and to modify
the relations generated from the E-R model to track temporal changes.