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Identifying Relationship and Weak Relationship

Both weak and identifying relationships represent associations between entities in a database, using foreign keys. However, weak relationships imply that one entity cannot exist without the other, becoming a "weak entity" with a partial primary key. Identifying relationships do not affect entity existence, but use the primary keys of associated entities to form their own primary key. Weak relationships are shown as double rectangles and identifying relationships with diamonds in Entity-Relationship Diagrams.

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79 views

Identifying Relationship and Weak Relationship

Both weak and identifying relationships represent associations between entities in a database, using foreign keys. However, weak relationships imply that one entity cannot exist without the other, becoming a "weak entity" with a partial primary key. Identifying relationships do not affect entity existence, but use the primary keys of associated entities to form their own primary key. Weak relationships are shown as double rectangles and identifying relationships with diamonds in Entity-Relationship Diagrams.

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Surendra
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© © All Rights Reserved
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In database design, both weak relationships and identifying

relationships are used to model associations between entities.


Here are some similarities between the two:
Entity Association: Both weak and identifying relationships
represent associations between two or more entities in a
relational database model.
Foreign Keys: Both types of relationships use foreign keys to
establish the association. Foreign keys are attributes in one
entity that refer to the primary key of another entity, creating a
link between them.
Normalization: Both types of relationships contribute to the
process of database normalization, which aims to organize data
to reduce redundancy and improve data integrity.
Cardinality: Both relationships have cardinality constraints that
define the number of occurrences of entities that can be
associated with each other. For example, one-to-one, one-to-
many, or many-to-many relationships can exist in both weak and
identifying relationships.
However, there are some key differences between weak and
identifying relationships:
Weak Relationship:
A weak relationship is one where the existence of one entity depends on the
existence of another entity. In other words, the weak entity cannot exist
without the corresponding strong entity.
It has a partial key as part of its primary key, in addition to its relationship
with the strong entity.
Weak entities typically have a "parent" entity (the strong entity) and are
represented using a double rectangle in an Entity-Relationship Diagram
(ERD).

Imagine you have two entities: "House" and "Room." A weak relationship
between them means that a room cannot exist without a house. In other
words, a room needs a house to belong to; it can't exist on its own.
Example: A house can have many rooms like a living room, kitchen, and
bedroom. Each of these rooms is a weak entity because it cannot exist
independently. The rooms need the house they belong to (the "parent"
entity) to exist in the database.
Identifying Relationship:
An identifying relationship is used to identify the association between two or more
entities, but it does not impact the existence of any entity involved.
It uses the primary key attributes of the associated entities to form its own primary
key. As a result, the identifying relationship's primary key includes the primary keys of
the associated entities.
Identifying relationships are represented using a diamond shape in an ERD.

Consider two entities: "Student" and "Class." An identifying relationship means that
the association between a student and a class helps identify each student uniquely. In
this case, the relationship's primary key includes the primary keys of both entities.
Example: Let's say a student can be enrolled in multiple classes, and each class can
have multiple students. To represent this, we create an identifying relationship
between "Student" and "Class" using their respective primary keys. The primary key
of the relationship table would include the student's ID and the class's ID, making
each combination unique.

In summary, both weak and identifying relationships are used to model associations
in a relational database, but they differ in their impact on entity existence and the
composition of their primary keys.

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