ENTITY-RELATIONSHIP MODEL - 2

Dr. Ejaz Ahmed 1

 Objective

 Weak Entity Types +

 Higher Degree Relationships +
 Refining the ER Diagram for the COMPANY Database +
 Summary of ER Diagram Notations +
 Alternative Notations for ER Diagrams +

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Summary of ER diagram notation.

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 Weak Entity Types …

 An entity whose existence depends on some other

entity type is called a weak entity type. Otherwise, it is
called a strong entity type. There is a chance of
records’ duplications on non-key attributes.

 Entities belonging to a weak entity type are identified

by being related to specific entities from another entity
type in combination with some of their attribute values.

 We call this other entity type identifying, or owner,

entity type and we call the relationship that relates a
weak entity type to its owner type the identifying
relationship type of the weak entity type.
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 Weak Entity Types

 A weak entity type always has a total participation constraint with

respect to its identifying relationship type.

 Weak entity types are uniquely identified by a partial key that will
be added to the key of the strong entity type that it is associated
with. In the ER digram a partial key is a dashed underline.

 For example, in the COMPANY database, the DEPENDENT entity

type dependes on the existence of the EMPLOYEE entity type, i.e.
no dependent will exist in the database unless at least one of
his/her parents works as an employee in the company.

 The DEPENDENT entity type has the dependent name as a partial

key that will be added to the SSN of the employee who is
associated with, to uniquely identify the dependent.

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Week Entity – Duplications Example

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 Weak Entities …
 All ID-Dependent (identified) entities MAY BE
considered weak.
 Examples: ATM Card & Transactions, Patient and
Patient visits, Patient & Issue Medicines, Employee &
Dependent Family Members, Loan and its
Installments
 But there are also some non-ID-dependent
weak entities.
 The identifier of the parent does not appear in the
identifier of the weak child entity in ER Diagram.

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Identifying & Weak Entity - Example

EMPLOYEE(ENO, Name, Gender, DOB, Addr, City, CNIC)

Dependent(ENO, SNO, Name, Gender, DOB, RelType)

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 Examples …

Employee, Passport are ID Dependent (identifying) but not

weak entities. Whereas Student, CourseTaken would be …
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Two ways – one example

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 Higher Degree Relationships

 In many instances, it is required to represent

relationship that is of a degree higher than 2 (HD), i.e.
it involves more than two entity types.

 Sometime these relationships can be represented using

binary relations, although sometime this may not give
the same meaning.

 For example the tuple (s, p, j) which states that

SUPPLIER s supplies PART p to PROJECT j may not be
expressed by the three tuples (s,p), (s,j) and (p,j).

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 Ternary Relationship

This is M-N relationship

Below is a data flow diagram or flow-chart, but it is

NOT an ER Model

Other example can be Employee, Job and Bank-Branch

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 Higher Degree Relationships

Note: (b) is not ternary relationship

Other Examples are: Student, Semester, Course; Instructor, Semester, Course;
Candidate, Company, Interview; Campus, Departments, Schools for our univ.)13
 Suitability of Ternary Relationship

Following relationship is not correct, why?

Ternary relationship is not valid for Instructor, Course & Semester

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 Case Study

In your university library members issue books and

return back issued books.
Draw an ER Diagram with mapping and data sets

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 Alternative Notations for ER Diagrams …

 There are many alternative diagrammatic notations for

displaying ER diagrams.

 Appendix A of the text book, “Fundamentals of

Database Systems” by Elmasri and Navathe, gives
some of the more popular notations.

 Later in the course we will introduce the Universal

Modeling Language (UML) notation, which has been
proposed as a standard for conceptual object modeling.

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 Alternative Notations for ER Diagrams …

 Here we will describe one alternative notation for specifying

structural constraints on relationships. This notation involves
associating a pair of integer number (min, max) with each
participation of an entity type E in a relationship type R, where
0 <= min <= max and 1 <= max

 The numbers mean that for each entity e in E, e must participate

in at lease min and in at most max relationship instances in R at
any point in time.

 In this method, min = 0 implies partial participation, where as

min > 0 implies total participation.

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Another E-R Model representation of the COMPANY Database

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 Relationship’s Meaning

Any department has at least one or more than one

employee. There are some employees who do not have
department

• Plant - an organizational element within a company. A plant

produces goods, renders services, or makes goods available for
distribution. A plant can be a manufacturing facility.
• Storage location – an organizational unit within a plant. A
storage location identifies the general area in the plant where
material is stored. Plants can have multiple storage locations.

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 Binary Relationship

Exercise: Students are enrolled in a Course and

each Course has one recommended Book. Same
Book is assigned to more than one Courses.
Exercise: A person drives a car. Person owns many cars.
Exercise: Students enroll in many courses with semester
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 Entity Parts or Items

Many issues can be considered, for example

Consumable or fixed items or parts etc.
What are the possible attributes are needed for
some entity?
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 Exercise – ER Model & Mapping

Part (Part#, PName, Weight, MakeYear, Price, PType, RefPart#)

PType: Assembled product/ parts (e.g., Motorcycle) or single part

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 Item’s Price History (Indentifying & Weak)

Item(Item#, Name, Descr, Sprice, Pprice, Qty)

ItemPriceHistory(Item#, SNO, PriceDate, SPrice, PPrice)

Other example can be Loan and its Instalments payments

Make Questions for possible ER and Datasets

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 Entity Validity - Example
 SECTION is not an entity because it contains serial
numbers such as 01, 02, …
Or A, B, C etc. Section with Descr. can be
 Transcript is not an entity, why?
 Entity must contains more than
one records & more than one columns
 SEMESTER is an entity because it contains attributes such
as
SemesterID: 091
SemesterStartDate: 12/02/2010
SemesterEndDate: 22/06/2010
SGPA: 2.58 (Calculated attribute)
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Exercise

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Summary – Strong & Weak Entities

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 Practical Exercise – Draft to
Refine Shape versions

Make at least 3 versions of one ER Model to get optimum solution

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 Summary of ER Diagram Notations

 The cardinality ratio of each binary relations, such as

WORKS_FOR, is specified by placing a 1, M or N on
each participating edge.

 The participation constraint is specified by a single line

for partial participation and double lines for total
participation.

 For recursive relationship type, such as SUPERVISION,

the different role names of the entity type are placed
on the different edges of the relationship type.
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If you don’t follow design/ model
then …

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