Entity Relationship Model
Week 4
CMIS570
SDLC
Project Planning
Analysis
**
Design
Implementation
Support
The Entity-Relationship
Diagram
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Picture of the people, places, objects, things,
events, or concepts, their characteristics and
relationships, for an organization or business.
Visual representation
Communication tool
Independent of technology
Understandable representation of
organization data
The Components of an E-R
Diagram…
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Entitites
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Person, place, object, event, or concept (nouns)
Things about which we wish to collect data
Employee
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Relationship
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Association between entities (verbs)
Directional
Works
Notation
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Entities
Residence
Hall
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Student
Relationships
Residence
Hall
Lives
in
Student
More about relationships
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Degree
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Number of entities involved
Typical
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Unary (e.g. is married to)
Binary (most common)
The relationship “lives in” is of what
degree?
And another thing…
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Cardinality
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Number of instances of one entity that are
associated with another
Minimum and maximum – lower and upper
bounds on the number of instances
Typically: 0, 1, many – deviations can be
noted
Mandatory and optional
Examples!
More examples!
And there’s more
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Attributes
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Properties or characteristics of entities
Actual data items we collect
EmpName
Employee
EmpAddr
EmpJob
Primary Keys
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Attributes that uniquely identify an
entity instance.
How to choose:
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Should not change over time (like age)
Must have unique, non-null value
Use as few attributes as possible
Identifying the primary key
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Select the attribute
Underline it
EmpName
Employee
EmpID
EmpAddr
EmpJob
Practice
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The Marathoner, a monthly magazine, regularly
reports the performance of professional marathon
runners. It has asked you to design a database to
record the details of all major marathons (e.g.,
Boston, London, Paris). Professional marathon
runners compete in several races each year. A race
may have thousands of competitors, but only about
200 or so are professional runners, the ones The
Marathoner tracks. For each race, the magazine
reports some personal details such as name, gender,
and age as well information about the race.
Multi-valued attributes
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Attributes that can have multiple values
Can change to standard binary
relationship.
Multi-valued attributes
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Attributes that can have multiple values
Employee
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EmpSkill
Need to fix it before the next phase
Employee
has
Skill
SkillCode
SkillName
More Practice
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Kisha, against the advice of her friends, was simultaneously
studying data management and Shakespearian drama. She
thought the two subjects would be an interesting contrast.
However, the classes are very demanding and often enter her
dreams. Last night, she dreamt that William Shakespeare
wanted her to draw a data model. He explained, before she
woke up in a cold sweat, that a play had many characters, but
the same character never appeared in more than one play.
“Methinks,” he said, “the same name may have appeareth more
than the once, but twas always a person of a different ilk.” He
then, she hazily recollects, went on to spout about the quality of
data dropping like gentle rain… Draw a model to keep old Bill
quiet and help Kisha get some sleep.
Miscellaneous Stuff …
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How many relationships can the same
entities be involved in?
How to choose entities?
Modeling Hints and Tips
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Use different names for different things.
If an entity has only one attribute, think
about making the entity an attribute of
another entity.
Model the data – not the physical artifacts
(reports)
Do NOT try to write code or think about the
final format for the data.
Don’t worry about Ifs, or how to connect
entities except through relationships.
Practice
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A laboratory has several chemists who work on
various projects and who may use certain kinds
of equipment on each project. The laboratory
manager wishes to create a database to track
chemists, their projects, and the equipment that
gets used on various projects. For each chemist,
you should capture their name and phone
number. For each project, include the project ID
and the start date. For each piece of equipment,
track the equipment ID number and cost. Feel
free to add items if they are needed.
A little more practice …
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In an organization, the COO is responsible for
managing production runs. Each production run
uses a variety of materials, some of which are
specialized to the specific run. Each material is
bought from a single “preferred” vendor, at a
pre-negotiated price. The materials are later sold
to a variety of vendors, and priced depending on
the contract with that vendor (and the prices
change over time). At the end of each day, a
production report is prepared to summarize the
production runs of the day. That report is
delivered to the COO to review.