Entity Relationship Models

Sumant Kulkarni, Yogalakshmi {sumant.kulkarni, j.yogalakshmi}@iiitb.org

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Agenda

Use of ER Model for Conceptual Models Basic Structure of ER Model Example of ER model development Discussion

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ER Model

Concise description of data requirements of the users For better visualization of entities and relations Understanding concepts involved in the miniworld No implementation details

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Basic Elements of ER Model

The miniworld is described in terms of: Entity Attribute Relationships

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Description of an Example of a miniworld

Every student is identied by his student number. The system also knows about his Date of Birth, current and permanent addresses, and his joining date. Every student registers for some courses or works for projects or does both. Student can either audit the course or take it for credit. He obtains grades for the courses he takes on credit. These grades are available for all the subjects the student has taken on credit till now. These credits decide whether he has passed or failed in the subject.

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Description of an Example of a miniworld

Every course is oered by one or more professors (combined). So, each faculty member spends a specic number of hours on the course he oers. A professor can be involved in oering many courses. Every course belongs to a stream. It also has a name, unique course number. There are some credit associated with the course.

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Description of an Example of a miniworld

Professor may be in-charges of a lab. A lab can have one or more in-charges. A lab can have multiple projects running under it from specic start dates. If a student opts to work for a projects, then depending upon the need of the project, he has to spend some know amount of time on the project. Similar to the student id, there will be unique identication numbers for every faculty member, lab and project.

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Elements of ER Model

Entity Attribute
Composite versus Simple (Atomic) Attributes Single-Valued versus Multivalued Attributes Stored versus Derived Attributes Null Attributes (NA)

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Elements of ER Model

Entity Set Key Attributes of an Entity Type (uniqueness constraint) Value Sets (Domains) of Attributes. Value Set of composite attribute. V = P(V 1)XP(V 2)X ...XP(Vn) where P(Vi) is the powerset of Vi.

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Exploring Relationships

What is Relationship? Relationship Types Relationship Instances Relationship Sets Participation

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Exploring Relationships

Relationship Degree (unary, binary, ternary) Relationship as Attributes Role Names and Recursive Relationships

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Constraints on Relationship Types

Cardinality Ratios for Binary Relationships Total participation (existence dependency) Partial participation

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Attributes of Relationship Types

Migration of Attributes from Relationship Types Migration in 1:1 Relationship type Migration in 1:N Relationship type. Migration in M:N Relationship type

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Weak Entity Types

Owner (identifying) entity type Identifying relationship A weak entity type always has a total participation constraint. A weak entity type normally has Partial key

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Summery of Symbols

Figure: Summery of Symbols of E-R modeling

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Student Academic Information System as ER Model

Let us list all the entities from the description given....

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Relations between Entities

Let us List down....

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References

Elmasri, R. and Navathe, S.B. Fundamentals Of Database Systems. Pearson Education Chen, P.P. The Entity Relationship Model - Towards a Unied View of Data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems. 1976

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Any Questions/Inputs/Suggestions?

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