ER Symbols

Entity relationship diagrams have specific symbols that represent each element. One of the primary
concepts is the idea of entities.

Entities. These are generally nouns such as client, manager, employee and salary. Strong entities
exist by themselves apart from other entities. Weak entities, on the other hand, rely on another entity
type. Associative entities are a hybrid, with associations between one or more types of entities.

Relationships. Relationship symbols detail the associations between entities, and are typically verbs
that show how the entities interact. A weak relationship depicts the connection between an entity
type that is weak and its corresponding owner.

Attributes. Attributes describe characteristics of a relationship or an entity. In the case of

relationships, they can be one-to-one or many-to-many. Attributes can detail characteristics that are
common to every entity or most instances of a specific entity. Examples of attributes include name,
employee number and pay rate. In this case, these items are attributes of an employee entity. An
attribute that identifies a single instance of an entity is named the primary key, and is also known as

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the identifier. In the example above, the employee number may be the identifier for the employee
entity.

Physical Symbols. These symbols represent items in the physical model above such as fields, tables,
types and keys. These are the building blocks of the database itself.

Notations. To illustrate the relationships involved, notational lines are drawn. The original and most
common method is called Crows Feet. However, a number of different notation formats has evolved
for a variety of processes. They include UML, Barker Notation and Information Engineering.

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