Chapter 2:

Entity Relationship Model

BIBHA STHAPIT
ASST. PROFESSOR
IOE, PULCHOWK CAMPUS

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 Design Phases
• Initial phase -- characterize fully the data needs of
the prospective database users.

• Second phase -- choosing a data model

– Applying the concepts of the chosen data model
– Translating these requirements into a conceptual
schema of the database.
– A fully developed conceptual schema indicates the
functional requirements of the enterprise.
• Describe the kinds of operations (or
transactions) that will be performed on the data.
 Design Phases (Cont.)
§ Final Phase -- Moving from an abstract data model to the
implementation of the database
– Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.
• Database design requires that we find a “good”
collection of relation schemas.
§ Business decision – What attributes should we record
in the database?
§ Computer Science decision – What relation schemas
should we have and how should the attributes be
distributed among the various relation schemas?
– Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of the
database
 Design Alternatives
§ In designing a database schema, we must ensure that we
avoid two major pitfalls:
• Redundancy: a bad design may result in repeat
information.
§ Redundant representation of information may lead to
data inconsistency among the various copies of
information
• Incompleteness: a bad design may make certain aspects
of the enterprise difficult or impossible to model.
§ Avoiding bad designs is not enough. There may be a large
number of good designs from which we must choose.
 Design Approaches
§ Entity Relationship Model (covered in this chapter)
• Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and
relationships
§ Entity: a “thing” or “object” in the enterprise that is
distinguishable from other objects
• Described by a set of attributes
§ Relationship: an association among several entities
• Represented diagrammatically by an entity-relationship
diagram

§ Normalization Theory
• Formalize what designs are bad, and test for them
• The ER data mode was developed to facilitate database
design by allowing specification of an enterprise schema
that represents the overall logical structure of a database.
• The ER data model employs three basic concepts:
– entity sets,
– relationship sets,
– attributes.
• The ER model also has an associated diagrammatic
representation, the ER diagram, which can express the
overall logical structure of a database graphically.
 Entity Sets
• A database can be modeled as:
– a collection of entities,
– relationship among entities.
• An entity is an object that exists and is
distinguishable from other objects.
Example: specific person, company, event, plant
• Entities have attributes
Example: people have names and addresses
• An entity set is a set of entities of the same type
that share the same properties.
Example: set of all persons, companies, trees, holidays
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 Entity Sets customer and loan
customer-id customer- customer- customer- loan- amount
name street city number

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 Attributes
• An entity is represented by a set of attributes, that is descriptive
properties possessed by all members of an entity set.
Example:
customer = (customer-id, customer-name,
customer-street, customer-city)
loan = (loan-number, amount)
• Domain – the set of permitted values for each attribute
• Attribute types:
– Simple and composite attributes.
– Single-valued and multi-valued attributes
• E.g. multivalued attribute: phone-numbers
– Derived attributes
• Can be computed from other attributes
• E.g. age, given date of birth

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Composite Attributes

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 Relationship Sets
• A relationship is an association among several entities
Example:
Hayes depositor A-102
customer entity relationship setaccount entity
• A relationship set is a mathematical relation among n  2
entities, each taken from entity sets
{(e1, e2, … en) | e1  E1, e2  E2, …, en  En}

where (e1, e2, …, en) is a relationship

– Example:
(Hayes, A-102)  depositor

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Relationship Set borrower

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 Relationship Sets (Cont.)
• An attribute can also be property of a relationship set.
• For instance, the depositor relationship set between entity sets
customer and account may have the attribute access-date

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 Degree of a Relationship Set
• Refers to number of entity sets that participate in a
relationship set.
• Relationship sets that involve two entity sets are binary (or
degree two). Generally, most relationship sets in a database
system are binary.
• Relationship sets may involve more than two entity sets.
– E.g. Suppose employees of a bank may have jobs (responsibilities)
at multiple branches, with different jobs at different branches. Then
there is a ternary relationship set between entity sets employee, job
and branch
• Relationships between more than two entity sets are rare.
Most relationships are binary.
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 Degree of a Relationship
• The number of participating entities in a relationship is
known as the degree of the relationship.
• Unary relationships are also known as a recursive
relationship. manages

Employee

• It is a relationship where the same entity participates more

than once in different roles.
• In the example above we are saying that employees are
managed by employees.
• If we wanted more information about who manages whom,
we could introduce a second entity type called manager.
 Degree of a Relationship
• If there are two entity types involved it is a binary relationship type
manages
Manager Employee

• If there are three entity types involved it is a ternary relationship

type
Sales sells
Assistant Product

Customer

• It is also possible to have a n-ary relationship

 Replacing ternary
relationships
When ternary relationships occurs in an ER model they should
always be removed before finishing the model. Sometimes the
relationships can be replaced by a series of binary relationships
that link pairs of the original ternary relationship.

Sales sells
Assistant Product

assists Customer buys

n This can result in the loss of some information - It is no longer

clear which sales assistant sold a customer a particular product.
n Try replacing the ternary relationship with an entity type and a set
of binary relationships.
 Replacing Ternary
relationships
Relationships are usually verbs, so name the new entity type by the
relationship verb rewritten as a noun.
n The relationship sells can become the entity type sale.
Sales Sale Product
Assistant makes involves

requests Customer

n So a sales assistant can be linked to a specific customer and

both of them to the sale of a particular product.
n This process also works for higher order relationships.
 Mapping Cardinalities
• Express the number of entities to which another
entity can be associated via a relationship set.
• Most useful in describing binary relationship sets.
• For a binary relationship set the mapping
cardinality must be one of the following types:
– One to one
– One to many
– Many to one
– Many to many

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 Mapping Cardinalities

One to one One to many

Note: Some elements in A and B may not be mapped to any
elements in the other set
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 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
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 Mapping Cardinalities affect ER Design

n Can make access-date an attribute of account, instead of a relationship

attribute, if each account can have only one customer
n I.e., the relationship from account to customer is many to one, or
equivalently, customer to account is one to many

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 E-R Diagrams

n Rectangles represent entity sets.

n Diamonds represent relationship sets.
n Lines link attributes to entity sets and entity sets to relationship sets.
n Ellipses represent attributes
n Double ellipses represent multivalued attributes.
n Dashed ellipses denote derived attributes.
n Underline indicates primary key attributes 23
E-R Diagram With Composite, Multivalued, and Derived
Attributes

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Relationship Sets with Attributes

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 Roles
• Entity sets of a relationship need not be distinct
• The labels “manager” and “worker” are called roles; they specify how
employee entities interact via the works-for relationship set.
• Roles are indicated in E-R diagrams by labeling the lines that connect
diamonds to rectangles.
• Role labels are optional, and are used to clarify semantics of the
relationship

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 Cardinality Constraints
• We express cardinality constraints by drawing either a directed
line (), signifying “one,” or an undirected line (—), signifying
“many,” between the relationship set and the entity set.
• E.g.: One-to-one relationship:
– A customer is associated with at most one loan via the relationship
borrower
– A loan is associated with at most one customer via borrower

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 One-To-Many Relationship
• In the one-to-many relationship a loan is associated with at
most one customer via borrower, a customer is associated
with several (including 0) loans via borrower

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 Many-To-One Relationships
• In a many-to-one relationship a loan is associated with
several (including 0) customers via borrower, a customer
is associated with at most one loan via borrower

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 Many-To-Many Relationship

• A customer is associated with several (possibly 0) loans via

borrower
• A loan is associated with several (possibly 0) customers via
borrower
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 Alternative Notation for Cardinality Limits

n Cardinality limits can also express participation constraints

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• A super key of an entity set is a set of one or
more attributes whose values uniquely determine
each entity.
• A candidate key of an entity set is a minimal super
key
– Customer-id is candidate key of customer
– account-number is candidate key of account
• Although several candidate keys may exist, one
of the candidate keys is selected to be the
primary key.
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The combination of primary keys of the participating entity
sets forms a super key of a relationship set.
(customer-id, account-number) is the super key of
depositor
NOTE: this means a pair of entity sets can have at most
one relationship in a particular relationship set.
E.g. if we wish to track all access-dates to each account by
each customer, we cannot assume a relationship for each
access. We can use a multivalued attribute though
Must consider the mapping cardinality of the relationship set
when deciding the what are the candidate keys
Need to consider semantics of relationship set in selecting
the primary key in case of more than one candidate key 33
An entity set that does not have a primary key is referred to as a
weak entity set.
The existence of a weak entity set depends on the existence of a
identifying entity set
 it must relate to the identifying entity set via a total, one-to-many
relationship set from the identifying to the weak entity set
 Identifying relationship depicted using a double diamond
The discriminator (or partial key) of a weak entity set is the set of
attributes that distinguishes among all the entities of a weak
entity set.
The primary key of a weak entity set is formed by the primary
key of the strong entity set on which the weak entity set is
existence dependent, plus the weak entity set’s discriminator.

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We depict a weak entity set by double rectangles.
We underline the discriminator of a weak entity set with a
dashed line.
payment-number – discriminator of the payment entity set
Primary key for payment – (loan-number, payment-
number)

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Note: the primary key of the strong entity set is not
explicitly stored with the weak entity set, since it is
implicit in the identifying relationship.
If loan-number were explicitly stored, payment
could be made a strong entity, but then the
relationship between payment and loan would be
duplicated by an implicit relationship defined by the
attribute loan-number common to payment and loan

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In a university, a course is a strong entity and
a course-offering can be modeled as a weak
entity
The discriminator of course-offering would be
semester (including year) and section-number
(if there is more than one section)
If we model course-offering as a strong entity
we would model course-number as an attribute.
Then the relationship with course would be
implicit in the course-number attribute

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 Constructing an ER model -
Entities
• Before beginning to draw the ER model, read the
requirements specification carefully. Document
any assumptions you need to make.
1.Identify entities - list all potential entity types. These
are the object of interest in the system. It is better to
put too many entities in at this stage and them discard
them later if necessary.

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 Constructing an ER model -
Entities
2. Remove duplicate entities - Ensure that they really
separate entity types or just two names for the same thing.
• Also do not include the system as an entity type
• e.g. if modelling a library, the entity types might be
books, borrowers, etc.
• The library is the system, thus should not be an entity
type.

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 Constructing an ER model -
Attributes
3. List the attributes of each entity (all properties to
describe the entity which are relevant to the application).
– Ensure that the entity types are really needed.
• are any of them just attributes of another entity
type?
• if so keep them as attributes and cross them off
the entity list.
– Do not have attributes of one entity as attributes of
another entity!
4. Mark the primary keys.
– Which attributes uniquely identify instances of that entity type?
– This may not be possible for some weak entities.

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 Constructing an ER model -
Relationships
5. Define the relationships
– Examine each entity type to see its relationship to the
others.
6. Describe the cardinality and optionality of the
relationships
– Examine the constraints between participating entities.
7. Remove redundant relationships
– Examine the ER model for redundant relationships.

ER modelling is iterative, so expect to draw several

versions. Note that there is no one right answer to the
problem, but some solutions are better than others!
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 Country Bus Company
A Country Bus Company owns a number of buses. Each bus
is allocated to a particular route, although some routes may
have several buses. Each route passes through a number of
towns. One or more drivers are allocated to each stage of a
route, which corresponds to a journey through some or all of
the towns on a route. Some of the towns have a garage
where buses are kept and each of the buses are identified by
the registration number and can carry different numbers of
passengers, since the vehicles vary in size and can be single
or double-decked. Each route is identified by a route number
and information is available on the average number of
passengers carried per day for each route. Drivers have an
employee number, name, address, and sometimes a
telephone number.
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 Entities
• Bus - Company owns busses and will hold information
about them.
• Route - Buses travel on routes and will need described.
• Town - Buses pass through towns and need to know
about them
• Driver - Company employs drivers, personnel will hold
their data.
• Stage - Routes are made up of stages
• Garage - Garage houses buses, and need to know
where they are.

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 Relationships
• A bus is allocated to a route and a route may have several buses.
– Bus-route (m:1) is serviced by
• A route comprises of one or more stages.
– route-stage (1:m) comprises
• One or more drivers are allocated to each stage.
– driver-stage (m:1) is allocated
• A stage passes through some or all of the towns on a route.
– stage-town (m:n) passes-through
• A route passes through some or all of the towns
– route-town (m:n) passes-through
• Some of the towns have a garage
– garage-town (1:1) is situated
• A garage keeps buses and each bus has one ‘home’ garage
– garage-bus (m:1) is garaged 44
 Attributes
• Bus (reg-no,make,size,deck,no-pass)
• Route (route-no,avg-pass)
• Driver (emp-no,name,address,tel-no)
• Town (name)
• Stage (stage-no)
• Garage (name,address)

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Draw E-R Diagram

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 Splitting n:m Relationships
A many to many relationship in an ER model is not
necessarily incorrect. They can be replaced using
an intermediate entity. This should only be done
where:

• the m:n relationship hides an entity

• the resulting ER diagram is easier to understand.

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 Splitting n:m Relationships - example

Consider the case of a car hire company. Customers hire

cars, one customer hires many cars and a car is hired by
many customers.
m hire n
Customer Car

The many to many relationship can be broken down to reveal

a ‘hire’ entity, which contains an attribute ‘date of hire’.

m n
Customer Hire Car
E-R Diagram with a Ternary
Relationship

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 Cardinality Constraints on Ternary
Relationship
We allow at most one arrow out of a ternary (or greater
degree) relationship to indicate a cardinality constraint
E.g. an arrow from works-on to job indicates each employee
works on at most one job at any branch.
If there is more than one arrow, there are two ways of defining
the meaning.
 E.g a ternary relationship R between A, B and C with arrows to B
and C could mean
 1. each A entity is associated with a unique entity from B and C or
 2. each pair of entities from (A, B) is associated with a unique C
entity, and each pair (A, C) is associated with a unique B
 Each alternative has been used in different formalisms
 To avoid confusion we outlaw more than one arrow
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• Some relationships that appear to be non-binary
may be better represented using binary relationships
– E.g. A ternary relationship parents, relating a child to
his/her father and mother, is best replaced by two binary
relationships, father and mother
• Using two binary relationships allows partial
information (e.g. only mother being know)
– But there are some relationships that are naturally non-
binary
• E.g. works-on

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 Converting Non-Binary Relationships to Binary Form

• In general, any non-binary relationship can be represented

using binary relationships by creating an artificial entity set.
– Replace R between entity sets A, B and C by an entity set E, and three
relationship sets:
1. RA, relating E and A 2.RB, relating E and B
3. RC, relating E and C
– Create a special identifying attribute for E
– Add any attributes of R to E
– For each relationship (ai , bi , ci) in R, create
1. a new entity ei in the entity set E 2. add (ei , ai ) to RA
3. add (ei , bi ) to RB 4. add (ei , ci ) to RC

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 Converting Non-Binary Relationships to Binary Form

• Also need to translate constraints

– Translating all constraints may not be possible
– There may be instances in the translated schema that
cannot correspond to any instance of R
• Exercise: add constraints to the relationships RA, RB
and RC to ensure that a newly created entity
corresponds to exactly one entity in each of entity sets
A, B and C
– We can avoid creating an identifying attribute by making
E a weak entity set (described shortly) identified by the
three relationship sets

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Top-down design process; we designate
subgroupings within an entity set that are distinctive
from other entities in the set.
These subgroupings become lower-level entity sets
that have attributes or participate in relationships
that do not apply to the higher-level entity set.
Depicted by a triangle component labeled ISA (E.g.
customer “is a” person).
Attribute inheritance – a lower-level entity set
inherits all the attributes and relationship
participation of the higher-level entity set to which54it
is linked.
Specialization Example

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A bottom-up design process – combine a
number of entity sets that share the same
features into a higher-level entity set.
Specialization and generalization are
simple inversions of each other; they are
represented in an E-R diagram in the same
way.
The terms specialization and
generalization are used interchangeably.

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Can have multiple specializations of an entity set
based on different features.
E.g. permanent-employee vs. temporary-employee,
in addition to officer vs. secretary vs. teller
Each particular employee would be
a member of one of permanent-employee or temporary-
employee,
and also a member of one of officer, secretary, or teller
The ISA relationship also referred to as
superclass - subclass relationship
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 Design Constraints on a
Specialization/Generalization
Constraint on which entities can be members of a
given lower-level entity set.
condition-defined
 E.g. all customers over 65 years are members of senior-citizen
entity set; senior-citizen ISA person.
user-defined
Constraint on whether or not entities may belong to
more than one lower-level entity set within a single
generalization.
Disjoint
 an entity can belong to only one lower-level entity set
 Noted in E-R diagram by writing disjoint next to the ISA triangle
Overlapping
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 an entity can belong to more than one lower-level entity set
Completeness constraint -- specifies
whether or not an entity in the higher-level
entity set must belong to at least one of the
lower-level entity sets within a generalization.
total : an entity must belong to one of the lower-level
entity sets
partial: an entity need not belong to one of the lower-
level entity sets

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60
 Aggregation
n Consider the ternary relationship works-on, which we saw
earlier
n Suppose we want to record managers for tasks performed by
an employee at a branch

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Relationship sets works-on and manages represent overlapping information
Every manages relationship corresponds to a works-on
relationship
However, some works-on relationships may not correspond
to any manages relationships
 So we can’t discard the works-on relationship
Eliminate this redundancy via aggregation
Treat relationship as an abstract entity
Allows relationships between relationships
Abstraction of relationship into new entity
Without introducing redundancy, the following diagram represents:
An employee works on a particular job at a particular branch
An employee, branch, job combination may have an 62
associated manager
E-R Diagram With Aggregation

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The use of an attribute or entity set to represent an
object.
Whether a real-world concept is best expressed by
an entity set or a relationship set.
The use of a ternary relationship versus a pair of
binary relationships.
The use of a strong or weak entity set.
The use of specialization/generalization – contributes
to modularity in the design.
The use of aggregation – can treat the aggregate
entity set as a single unit without concern for the 64
details of its internal structure.
E-R Diagram for a Banking Enterprise

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66
Summary of Symbols (Cont.)

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Alternative E-R Notations

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• UML: Unified Modeling Language
• UML has many components to graphically model
different aspects of an entire software system
• UML Class Diagrams correspond to E-R Diagram,
but several differences.

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Summary of UML Class Diagram Notation

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• Entity sets are shown as boxes, and attributes are shown
within the box, rather than as separate ellipses in E-R
diagrams.
• Binary relationship sets are represented in UML by just
drawing a line connecting the entity sets. The relationship set
name is written adjacent to the line.
• The role played by an entity set in a relationship set may also
be specified by writing the role name on the line, adjacent to
the entity set.
• The relationship set name may alternatively be written in a box,
along with attributes of the relationship set, and the box is
connected, using a dotted line, to the line depicting the
relationship set.
• Non-binary relationships cannot be directly represented in
UML -- they have to be converted to binary relationships.

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UML Class Diagram Notation (Cont.)

*Note reversal of position in cardinality constraint depiction

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 UML Class Diagrams (Contd.)
• Cardinality constraints are specified in the form l..h, where l
denotes the minimum and h the maximum number of
relationships an entity can participate in.
• Beware: the positioning of the constraints is exactly the
reverse of the positioning of constraints in E-R diagrams.
• The constraint 0..* on the E2 side and 0..1 on the E1 side
means that each E2 entity can participate in at most one
relationship, whereas each E1 entity can participate in many
relationships; in other words, the relationship is many to one
from E2 to E1.
• Single values, such as 1 or * may be written on edges; The
single value 1 on an edge is treated as equivalent to 1..1,
while * is equivalent to 0..*.
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• Primary keys allow entity sets and relationship sets to be
expressed uniformly as tables which represent the contents of
the database.
• A database which conforms to an E-R diagram can be
represented by a collection of tables.
• For each entity set and relationship set there is a unique table
which is assigned the name of the corresponding entity set or
relationship set.
• Each table has a number of columns (generally
corresponding to attributes), which have unique names.
• Converting an E-R diagram to a table format is the basis for
deriving a relational database design from an E-R diagram.

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• A strong entity set reduces to a table with the same
attributes.

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• Composite attributes are flattened out by creating a separate
attribute for each component attribute
– E.g. given entity set customer with composite attribute name with
component attributes first-name and last-name the table corresponding to
the entity set has two attributes
name.first-name and name.last-name
• A multivalued attribute M of an entity E is represented by a
separate table EM
– Table EM has attributes corresponding to the primary key of E and an
attribute corresponding to multivalued attribute M
– E.g. Multivalued attribute dependent-names of employee is represented
by a table
employee-dependent-names( employee-id, dname)
– Each value of the multivalued attribute maps to a separate row of the
table EM
• E.g., an employee entity with primary key John and
dependents Johnson and Johndotir maps to two rows:
(John, Johnson) and (John, Johndotir)
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n A weak entity set becomes a table that includes a column for
the primary key of the identifying strong entity set

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• A many-to-many relationship set is represented as a table with columns
for the primary keys of the two participating entity sets, and any
descriptive attributes of the relationship set.
• E.g.: table for relationship set borrower

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 Redundancy of Tables
n Many-to-one and one-to-many relationship sets that are total on the
many-side can be represented by adding an extra attribute to the
many side, containing the primary key of the one side
n E.g.: Instead of creating a table for relationship account-branch, add
an attribute branch to the entity set account

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• For one-to-one relationship sets, either side can be
chosen to act as the “many” side
– That is, extra attribute can be added to either of the tables
corresponding to the two entity sets
• If participation is partial on the many side, replacing a
table by an extra attribute in the relation corresponding
to the “many” side could result in null values
• The table corresponding to a relationship set linking a
weak entity set to its identifying strong entity set is
redundant.
– E.g. The payment table already contains the information that
would appear in the loan-payment table (i.e., the columns
loan-number and payment-number). 80
• Method 1:
– Form a table for the higher level entity
– Form a table for each lower level entity set, include
primary key of higher level entity set and local attributes

table table attributes

person name, street, city
customer name, credit-rating
employee name, salary
– Drawback: getting information about, e.g., employee
requires accessing two tables

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 Representing Specialization as
Tables (Cont.)
• Method 2:
– Form a table for each entity set with all local and inherited
attributes
table table attributes
person name, street, city
customer name, street, city, credit-rating
employee name, street, city, salary

If specialization is total, no need to create table for generalized

entity (person)
– Drawback: street and city may be stored redundantly for persons
who are both customers and employees

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n To represent aggregation, create a table containing
n primary key of the aggregated relationship,
n the primary key of the associated entity set
n Any descriptive attributes

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n E.g. to represent aggregation manages between relationship
works-on and entity set manager, create a table
manages(employee-id, branch-name, title, manager-name)
n Table works-on is redundant provided we are willing to store
null values for attribute manager-name in table manages

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End of Chapter 2