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ER Model - Basic Concepts

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30 views5 pages

ER Model - Basic Concepts

Uploaded by

salau
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ER Model - Basic Concepts

The ER model defines the conceptual view of a database. It works around


real-world entities and the associations among them. At view level, the
ER model is considered a good option for designing databases.

Entity
An entity can be a real-world object, either animate or inanimate, 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.

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.

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.
Candidate Key − A minimal super key is called a candidate key. An entity
set may have more than one candidate key.
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.

Degree of Relationship
The number of participating entities in a relationship defines the degree of
the relationship.

Binary = degree 2
Ternary = degree 3
n-ary = degree

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.
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-one − More than one entities from entity set A can be associated
with at most one entity of entity set B, however an entity from entity set B
can be associated with more than one entity from entity set A.

Many-to-many − One entity from A can be associated with more than one
entity from B and vice versa.

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