CST203-2 Database Management Systems
Lecture 4
Student entity
NID
FName
LName
RegNo
ExamId
Birthdate
Keys
 A Key is a single attribute or combination of two or
more attributes of an entity set that is used to identify
one or more instances of the set
Student entity
NID
FName
LName
RegNo
ExamId
Birthdate
Super Key
 A super key of an entity set is a set of one or more
attributes whose values uniquely determine each
entity.
 A superkey is any set of attributes (K) such that no two
tuples of a relation can have the same values for K, i.e:
t1(K) != t2(K) for every possible pair of distinct tuples,
t1,t2.
Student entity
NID
FName
LName
RegNo
ExamId
Birthdate
Candidate Key
 A candidate key is a superkey such that no proper
subset of K is also a superkey.
 Customer-id is candidate key of customer
 account-number is candidate key of account
Student entity
NID
FName
LName
RegNo
ExamId
Birthdate
Primary key
 Although several candidate keys may exist, one of the
candidate keys is selected to be the primary key.
 Primary key does not allow duplicate values(repeating)
and null values
Student entity
NID
FName
LName
RegNo
ExamId
Birthdate
Unique key
 It wont allow duplicate values including NULL...
 Means that it will allow any thing only one time
....including null...
Strong entity types
 Regular entity types which have a primary key
attributes
Weak Entity Types
 An entity type that does not have a primary key
 The existence of a weak entity type depends on the existence of a
identifying or owner entity type
 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
 Total participation constraint
 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.
 Weak entity as an attribute
 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)
 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
Design of ER diagram
Initial design is created and then iteratively refined until the most suitable design
is reached
1.
Concept may be first modeled as an attribute and then refined in to
relationship(binary)
2.
An attribute that exists in several entity types may be elevated or promoted
to an independent entity type
e.g.: student, instructor, course has the common attribute
department number
3.
Inverse of 2nd one : if an entity type exists with a single attribute and is
related to only one entity …….
4.
Refine using specialization, generalization and relationships of higher
degree
Specialization
 Top-down design process
 we designate subgroupings within an entity set that are distinctive from other
entities in the set.
 Specific attributes
 Specific relationships
 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 which it is linked
Specialization Example
Generalization
 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.
Specialization and Generalization
 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
Design Constraints on a
Specialization/Generalization
 Constraint on which entities can be members of a given lower-level entity set.
 Condition-defined / predicate defined subclasses

E.g. all customers over 65 years are members of senior-citizen entity set; senior-citizen ISA person.
 User-defined specialization
 Disjointness constraint
 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
 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 specialization : an entity must belong to one of the lower-level entity sets
 Partial specialization : an entity need not belong to one of the lower-level entity sets
Insertion and deletion rules for
specialization and generalization
 Deleting from superclass
 Inserting in a superclass
 Predicate defined specialization
 Total specialization
Aggregation
 A class type really represents a collection of individual
components
 The system is an aggregation of components
 It denotes an "is part of" relationship
E-R Diagram for a Banking Enterprise
Summary of Symbols Used in E-R
Notation
Alternative E-R Notations