DBMS: Database Design

Akhilesh Arya
 ER- Diagrams
• An ER model is the logical representation of data as
objects and relationships among them.
• These objects are known as entities, and relationship is
an association among these entities.
• This model was designed by Peter Chen and published
in 1976 papers
Cont..
• Entity Relationship diagrams have three
different components-
– Entities
– Attributes
– Relationships
Notation of ER- Diagram
Components of ER Diagram
Entities
• Entities are the people, places, things, and
events.
• In short, anything which an organization
wants to store data about.
Works
Employee Department
For
Cont..
• Week Entity: An entity that depends on another entity
called a weak entity.
• The weak entity doesn't contain any key attribute of its
own.
• The weak entity is represented by a double rectangle.
Attribute
• Attributes are properties used to describe an
entity
– For example an EMPLOYEE entity may have the
attributes Name, SSN, Address, Sex, BirthDate

Key Attribute: An attribute of an entity type for which each entity must
have a unique value is called a key attribute of the entity type
Cont..
• Composite attribute: consists of several components
(e.g., address)
Cont..
• Multivalued attribute: contains more than one
value
Cont..
• Derived attribute: computed from other
attributes (e.g., age can be computed from the
date of birth and the current date)
Relation
Example: One is to One
• A student has only one identification card
ad an identification card is given to one
person only
Example: One is to Many
• A customer can place multiple orders, but
an order cannot be placed by many
customers
Example: Many to One
• Student enrolls for only one course, but a
course can have many students.
Example: Many to Many
• Employee can have multiple projects and
project can have many employees
 Relationship
• A relationship is association between
entities
– Unary
– Binary
– Ternary
 Unary
• A unary relationship is presented as a
diamond which connects one entity to
itself as a loop

Employee Manages

The relationship means, some instance of the employee

Works
Employee Department
for

Every Employee works for a department

Doctor Prescription Patient

Works
Project Employee
On

Total Partial
 Extended ER Features
• Certain instances of the an entity class can
include attributes that are not needed in other
instances of the same entity class
• In this case it is useful to a super-class/ sub-class
structure
• This structure is also called as generalization/
specialization hierarchy
 Specialization
• Is the process of defining a set of sub-class of an entity
type; this entity is called the super-class of the
specialization

ISA
 Generalization
• It is the form of abstraction that specifies that two or
more entities that share common attributes can be
generalized into higher level entity type
 Aggregation
• Is used when we need to express a relationship
among relationship
• Aggregation is an abstraction through which
relationships are treated as a higher level entities
• A relationship between two entities is considered
as a single entity and then we draw a relationship
with this entity to another entity
Example
• Suppose we have a relationship among job, employee
and branch
• Now if we want to add a manager entity into the
existing relationship
• Manager entity will connect with all the three entity
with the relation manages
• With aggregation
(without introducing
redundancy) the ER
Diagram can be
represented as:
– An employee works on
a job at particular
branch
– An employee, branch
and job combination
may have an associate
manager
 Steps to draw ER diagrams
1. Identify the entity
2. Identify the relationships
3. Identify the attributes (keys)
4. Identify participation constraints and other
relevant attributes
5. Draw Complete ER diagram with all attributes
including the primary keys
 E-R model for college database
• Assumptions are given
– A college contains many departments
– Each department can offer many number of courses
– Many instructor can work only in one department
– An instructor can work only in one department
– For each department there is a head
– An instructor can be head of only one department
– Each instructor can take any number of courses
– A course can be taken by only one instructor
– A student can enroll for any number of courses
– Each course can have any number of student
1. Identify the Entities
 1. Identify the Entities
• Department
• Student
• Course
• Instructor
 2. Identify the relationships
• Between Student and Course
• Between Department and Course
• Between Department and Instructor
• Between Head of the Department and Instructor
• Between Course and instructor
 2. Identify the relationships
• One course is enrolled by multiple students and one student enrolls
for multiple courses hence the cardinality between course and
student is many to many
• The department offers many courses and each course belongs to
only one department, hence the cardinality between department
and course is one to many
• One department has multiple instructors and one instructor belongs
to one and only one department, hence the cardinality between
department and instructor is one to many
Cont..
• Each department there is a “head of the department” and one
instructor is “head of the department”, hence the cardinality is one
to one.
• One course is taught by only one instructor, but the instrutor
teaches many courses, hence the cardinality between course and
instructor is many to one.
3. Identify the key attributes
 3. Identify the key attributes
• Deptname is the key attribute for the entity “Department”
• Courseid is the key attribute for “Course” entity
• Studid is the key attribute for “Student” entity
• Instructor name or Id is the key attribute for “instructor” entity
4. Identify other relevant attributes
4. Identify other relevant attributes
• For the department entity, the relevant
attribute is location
• For course entity, course name, duration,
prerequisite
• For instructor entity, room, telephone
• For student entity, student name, DOB
E-R diagram
College
Database
 DBMS- Keys
• Keys play an important role in the relational database.
• It is used to uniquely identify any record or row of data
from the table.
• It is also used to establish and identify relationships
between tables.
• For example: In Student table, ID is used as a key
because it is unique for each student.
 Types of Keys
• Primary Key
• Candidate Key
• Super Key
• Foreign Key
• Alternate Key
• Composite Key
Primary Key
• It is the first key used to identify one and only one instance of
an entity uniquely.
• An entity can contain multiple keys, as we saw in the
PERSON table.
• The key which is most suitable from those lists becomes a
primary key.
• In the EMPLOYEE table, ID can be the primary key since it is
unique for each employee.
• In the EMPLOYEE table, we can even select License_Number
and Passport_Number as primary keys since they are also
unique.
Candidate Key
• A candidate key is an attribute or set of attributes that
can uniquely identify a tuple.
• Except for the primary key, the remaining attributes are
considered a candidate key.
• The candidate keys are as strong as the primary key.
• In the EMPLOYEE: SSN, Passport_Number,
License_Number, etc., are considered a candidate key.
Example

Primary Key
Super Key
• Super key is an attribute set that can uniquely identify a
tuple.
• A super key is a superset of a candidate key.
• For example: In the above EMPLOYEE table,
for(EMPLOEE_ID, EMPLOYEE_NAME), the name of
two employees can be the same, but their EMPLYEE_ID
can't be the same. Hence, this combination can also be a
key.
Foreign Key
• Foreign keys are the column of the table used to point to
the primary key of another table.
Alternate Key
• There may be one or more attributes or a combination of
attributes that uniquely identify each tuple in a relation.
• These attributes or combinations of the attributes are
called the candidate keys.
• One key is chosen as the primary key from these
candidate keys, and the remaining candidate key, if it
exists, is termed the alternate key.
Alternate Key- Example
Composite Key
• Whenever a primary key consists of more than one
attribute, it is known as a composite key. This key is also
known as Concatenated Key.