New Generation University college Dept MIS 2014/2022
Chapter Two: Entity Relationship model
The ER model defines the conceptual view of a database. It works around real world entities and
the associations among them. the ER model is considered a good option for designing databases.
Data models define how the logical structure of a database is modeled. Data Models are
fundamental entities to introduce abstraction in a DBMS. Data
models define how data is connected to each other and how they are processed and stored inside
the system. The very first data model could be flat data-models, where all the data used are to be
kept in the same plane. Earlier data models were not so scientific, hence they were prone to
introduce lots of duplication and update anomalies.
Major components of ERD modeling
Entity
An entity can be a real-world object, that can be easily identifiable. For example, in a school
database, students, teachers, classes, and courses offered can be considered as entities. All these
entities have some attributes or properties that give them their identity. An entity set is a
collection of similar types of entities. An entity set may contain entities with attribute sharing
similar values. For example, a Students set may contain all the students of a school; likewise a
Teachers set may contain all the teachers of a school from all faculties. Entity sets need not be
disjoint.
Attributes
Entities are represented by means of their properties called attributes. All attributes have values.
For example, a student entity may have name, class, and age as attributes. There exists a domain
or range of values that can be assigned to attributes. For example, a student's name cannot be a
numeric value. It has to be alphabetic. A student's age cannot be negative, etc.
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Types of Attributes
Simple attribute: Simple attributes are atomic values, which cannot be divided further. For
example, a student's phone number is an atomic value of 10 digits.
Composite attribute: Composite attributes are made of more than one
simple attribute. For example, a student's complete name may have first_name and last_name.
Derived attribute: Derived attributes are the attributes that do not exist in the physical
database, but their values are derived from other attributes present in the database. For example,
average_salary in a department should not be saved directly in the database, instead it can be
derived. For another example, age can be derived from data_of_birth.
Single-value attribute: Single-value attributes contain single value. For example:
Social_Security_Number.
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Multi-value attribute: Multi-value attributes may contain more than one values. For example,
a person can have more than one phone number, email_address, etc.
These attribute types can come together in a way like:
simple single-valued attributes
simple multi-valued attributes
composite single-valued attributes
composite multi-valued attributes
Entity-Set and Keys
Key is an attribute or collection of attributes that uniquely identifies an entity among entity set.
For example, the roll_number of a student makes him/her identifiable among students.
Super Key: A set of attributes (one or more) that collectively identifies an entity in an
entity set.
Primary Key: A primary key is one of the candidate keys chosen by the database designer
to uniquely identify the entity set.
Relationship
The association among entities is called a relationship. For example, an employee works_at a
department, a student enrolls in a course. Here, Works_at and Enrolls are called relationships.
Relationship Set
A set of relationships of similar type is called a relationship set. Like entities, a relationship
too can have attributes. These attributes are called descriptive attributes.
Mapping Cardinalities
Cardinality defines the number of entities in one entity set, which can be associated with the
number of entities of other set via relationship set.
One-to-one: One entity from entity set A can be associated with at most
one entity of entity set B and vice versa.
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One-to-many: One entity from entity set A can be associated with more
than one entities of entity set B, however an entity from entity set B can
be associated with at most one entity.
Many-to-many: One entity from A can be associated with more than one entity from B and vice
versa.
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