Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and
relationships should we store in the
database?
_ _ A database `schema’ in the ER Model
can be
represented pictorially (ER diagrams).
Entity Sets
One to one One to many
Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any
elements in the other set
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
Mapping Cardinalities affect ER Design
■ Can make accessdate an attribute of account, instead of a relationship
attribute, if each account can have only one customer
■ I.e., the relationship from account to customer is many to one, or
equivalently, customer to account is one to many
E-R Diagrams
■ Rectangles represent entity sets.
■ Diamonds represent relationship sets.
■ Lines link attributes to entity sets and entity sets to relationship sets.
■ Ellipses represent attributes
■ Double ellipses represent multivalued attributes.
■ Dashed ellipses denote derived attributes.
■ Underline indicates primary key attributes (will study later)
Introduction to Entity-Relationship (E-R)
Modeling
10.14
Entity-Relationship (E-R) Modeling
Key Terms
Entity
A person, place, object, event or concept in the user
environment about which the organization wishes to
maintain data
Represented by a rectangle in E-R diagrams
Entity Type
A collection of entities that share common properties or
characteristics
Attribute
A named property or characteristic of an entity that is of
interest to an organization
10.15
Entity-Relationship (E-R) Modeling
Key Terms
Candidate keys and identifiers
Each entity type must have an attribute or set of attributes
that distinguishes one instance from other instances of the
same type
Candidate key
Attribute (or combination of attributes) that uniquely identifies
each instance of an entity type
Depicting Entities and Attributes
Draw a portion of the ERD for each of these systems:
DePaul Campus Connect Registration System
Illinois Bureau of Motor Vehicles System
Amazon.com Product Information System
Entity-Relationship (E-R) Modeling
Key Terms
Identifier
A candidate key that has been selected as the unique
identifying characteristic for an entity type
Selection rules for an identifier