DATABASE

Management System
Using SQL – ER
Modeling
LECTURE NOTES

FOR REFERENCE

PROF (DR) D G JHA

 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Introduction
Before designing a database, the data processing needs of the
organisation should be determined. This can be achieved through
interviewing employees or by holding discussions or circulating
questionnaires. Not only the current needs of the organisation
should be taken into account but as far as possible its future needs
should also be ascertained. It is therefore important to note that –
Users information need should be carefully analysed before
designing a database. Any misinterpretation would result in
database that does not meet user’s requirements.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Once the user’s requirement is established, designing of the database
can begin. The two components of a database design are logical design
and physical design. In order to create logical database design – objects,
entities and relationships needs to be identified.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
For example, suppose a database is needed to be designed to store the
details about the people (stakeholders) associated with the
organisation. In this case, people associated could be identified as
suppliers, customers, employees, consultants, legal advisors. Once all
the stake holders are identified and the relationship between them is
established, it is then represented using a diagram.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
The diagram that helps in logical designing of a database is referred to
as Entity Relationship Attribute (ERA) model. This model helps in
identifying and organizing data logically.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Entities, Attributes and Identifiers
Consider DgGLASS Inc., as a manufacturing unit that designs and
makes bottles of various sizes, colours and capacities. Its client
includes leading manufacturers of cosmetics, soft drinks and
pharmaceuticals. The business cycle at DgGLASS Inc. can be
illustrated as:
 Modelling using Entity-
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 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
An Entity is an object with a distinct set of properties. An
entity could be a place, a person, a concept or an activity for
which data collection is possible. In simple terms, entity can
described as something in the real world that is needed to
be tracked. An entity has one or more characteristics.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
In the case of DgGLASS Inc., the Suppliers of the
organisation are different from the customers of the
organisation. Therefore, suppliers could be listed as one
entity and the customers as second entity. Similarly,
departments or units, items (raw material and finished
goods) and marketing channel (Distributors, Retailers) can
be identified as other entities with respect to DgGLASS Inc.
The entities identified here are just the partial list and can
be extended to include other entities that impact the
business.
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Relationship Diagram
Each of the entity is expressed using its attributes or properties. An
attribute is a quality or characteristic of an entity that describes or
identifies an entity. For example, the customer entity can have the
attributes such as customer code, customer name, customer address,
customer contact number and credit rating.
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Relationship Diagram
The details pertaining to the characteristic (or quality) of an entity is
termed as an instance of the entity. For example, data on customer
Divyanshu Jha will include his code (C001), address (A1/502 Neelyog
Apts.,), contact number (2 456 1234) and credit rating (A+). Thus, C001,
Divyanshu Jha, A1/502 Neelyog Apts., 2 456 1234, A+ - becomes an
instance of the entity customer.
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Relationship Diagram
A key or an identifier is an attribute used to identify unique instances of
entities or to set the relationship between the entities. The various keys
that an RDBMS support was introduced in the first chapter and will be
discussed further in the subsequent chapters.
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Relationship Diagram
Associations, Relationship and mapping
A relationship is an association between two entities. For example,
with respect to DgGLASS Inc.., Works In is a relationship between
the entities Employees and Department
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Identifying associations or relationships among different
entities forms an important step in designing databases. Not
only two entities could be related to each other but also
attributes within an entity can be related to each other.
Associations or relationship represent business rules – so it
is important to carefully interact with users to identify the
relationships. Correctly identifying relationships is
important to properly designing a database application.
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Relationship Diagram
There can be three types of relationship that can exist between two
entities – one-to-one (1:1), One-to-Many or Many-to-one (1: N) and
Many-to-many (N: N) - some other design methods use, the asterisk
(*) or the letter ‘M’ to read as “many” or the multiplicity in an
association.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
One-to-one Relationship (1:1): One-to-one relationship can be best
described as - for every instance of the first entity there exists exactly
one instance of second entity.
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Entity-Relationship Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
One-to-Many Relationship: The entities are related in a one-to-
many relationship (1: N), where for every instance of the first
entity, there can be zero, one or second instances of second entity.
And for every instance of the second entity there is exactly one
instance of the first entity.
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 Modelling using Entity-
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Many-to-many Relationship: Two entities are related in a Many-
to-many relationship (N: N), when for ever instance of the first
entity, there could be multiple instances of the second entity. Also,
for every instance of the second entity, there could be multiple
instances of the first entity.
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 Modelling using Entity-
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It is clear that a customer can place many order and each of
these order may contain zero (not so possible), exactly one
or many items. However, it does not specify as to how many
customers can be involved with one particular order? Many
businesses would specify that each of the order can come
from only one customer and hence there could be one-to-
many relationship (remember, every one-to-one
relationship is also an example of one-to-many relationship)
while some organisation might have multiple customers on
one order, which creates a many-to-many relationship. Such
a mapping is also referred to as a complex mapping.
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Relationship Diagram
A virtual model (referred to as E-R diagram or class diagram, these are
further explained in detail in later section) of the entities and
association for the above example can be illustrated as:
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 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Association Specifics: N-ary Associations
A relationship, as described in the earlier section, is an
association between two entities and each relationship
is identified by a name that describes the relationship.
Ideally relationship name is an active verb, but passive
verbs are also used. Verbs such as paints, learns and
manages make good relationship names.
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Thus, the relationships 1: M, M: N and 1:1 can be summarised as:
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 Modelling using Entity-
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A relationship’s degree indicates the number of associated entities or
participants.
A Unary relationship exists when an association is maintained within a
single entity.
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 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
In the case of unary relationship shown in figure 2.14, a
member within the MEMBER entity is a prerequisite for
another member within that entity. In this case existence of
a member prerequisite means that a MEMBER requires a
MEMBER – that is an individual before becoming a
member has to be introduced by another member –
MEMBER has a relationship with itself. Such a relationship is
also known as a recursive relationship.
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Relationship Diagram
A binary relationship exists when two entities are associated
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Relationship Diagram
A ternary relationship exists when three entities are associated. The
ternary relationship is briefly explained below:
Many-to-many associations between entities being complex cause
problems in the database design and therefore have to be split into
one-to-many relationship.
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Relationship Diagram
Consider a computer assembly station in which technicians
assemble components into final products (a customised
computer workstation). The entities identified are
technicians (having attributes such as tech_id, name…),
components (having attributes such as comp_id, type,
name…), and products (having attributes such as prod_id,
type, name…). There exist two many-to-many relationship
as represented below
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
The Complexity that arises out of many to many
relationships can be understood by visualising a situation
were the company wants to know which technician used
what components while assembling a product. This design
specific (the three entities and the corresponding
attributes) does not help in keeping track of which
technician worked on what product and which of the
components went into each product.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Since, it is possible that a technician may use more than one
component to assemble a single or many products. The
three main entities, technicians, components and products,
have to be actually related through an association (say
assembly). These associations are represented using
diamond sign and are described with its own set of
attributes. When two or more entities are related, the
relationship is called an n-ary association. Figure 2.16
shows the relationship between the three main entities
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 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
The association assembly will have attributes such as tech_id, prod_id,
comp_id. Each of the process is captured by the association assembly.
The assembly association solves the many-to-many problem, since each
row of the association assembly hold a data for one technician, one
component and one product.
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Relationship Diagram
In the actual business scenario, the many-to-many relationships must
be converted to a set of one-to-many relationship by adding different
associations between the entities that would help link them. The
associations usually represent the activities within the business and
often includes date/time stamp to record the moment when the
transaction actually occurs. For example, a date/time column when
included in association assembly will help when each event occurred.
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Relationship Diagram
The basic definitions can be summarized as follows:
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Entity Relationship Diagram
ER diagrams are tools for a database designer to
graphically display the logical database design of a
system. It is one of the best known semantic modeling
approach, introduced in 1976, by Chen and has been
continuously refined and modified since then.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
An ER diagram represents entities, the relationships that exist between
the entities and the attributes of these entities.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
It also helps the designer in identification of primary keys, type of
mapping between relations, naming of relations etc, Most importantly it
help in identifying the things or entities that requires continuous
observation and tracking.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Using the standard symbols a conceptual schema or overall logical
design is created. E-R diagrams are often reviewed repeatedly till it
satisfies all of the user’s information requirements.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
After finalising the logical model, it is converted into a physical model
which is then implemented as a relational database. Implementation of
E-R diagram is normally done by DBA using a Data Definition Language.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Any business comprises of many processes and each of the
processes is further tracked with the help of transactions.
The main processes of the business are referred to as
Master Business Processes. For example, in the case of
Commercial banking business model the master processes
could be related to Savings Account, Current Accounts,
Fixed Deposits, Equity Management, Loan Accounts… while
for DgGLASS Inc., the master processes could pertain to
Procurement of raw material, Shop floor Management,
Warehousing, Customer Management and so on.
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Relationship Diagram
Each of the master processes of the commercial banking business
model and DgGLASS Inc. can be described as an entity of the business
model. Each of the entity are characterised by fixed set of attributes and
are further decomposed into various sub-processes and activities. The
processes of decomposition of tables are explained in later chapters.
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Relationship Diagram
Entities can either exist independently or be related to each other. The
independent entities are referred to as strong or regular entities while
the dependent entities are known as weak entities.
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A weak entity is thus, an entity that is existence dependent on some
other entity and it cannot exist if that some other entity does not exist.
For example, Employees Dependents could be a weak entity – they
would exist only if the relevant employee exists.
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Relationship Diagram
It therefore becomes important not only to identify the entities and
their attributes but also the relationship that exists between the
entities. The ER diagrams have conventionally been used to describe the
entities, all its attributes and the relationships between the entities.
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
The ER diagram provides a simple and readily understood means of
communicating the salient features of the design of any given database.
Once the ER diagram is made, the designer using a DBMS can transform
them into tables. These tables are then used to record, store, retrieve
and manipulate the entity’s business data. Symbols
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Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Illustration-1: Every business has some items to offer and each one of
them is expected to have customers: A simple ER diagram representing
the process of customer buying the items is shown in figure 2.17
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Illustration-1: Every business has some items to offer and each one of
them is expected to have customers: A simple ER diagram representing
the process of customer buying the items is shown in figure 2.17
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Relationship Diagram
 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
Problems
1. In a hospital a set of doctors are available to check the patients that
visits the hospital during the OPD. For every test conducted on a
patient a log is maintained. Draw an E-R diagram for the hospital
management system representing the above scenario.
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 Modelling using Entity-
Relationship Diagram
2. A motor insurance company provides insurance against accidents
to the owners of cars. The company has large number of policy
holders and would like to store details about the policy holders,
the cars they own and the accidents as and when it happens.
Construct an ER diagram representing all of the above
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Application- Modelling using Entity-
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3. The Public Works Department (PWD) intends to store some of it’s
very critical data and automate it’s information system. The activity
begins with requirement analysis phase. The findings of the
requirement analysis are formerly recorded and listed as:
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The PWD in its first phase of automation is inclined towards keeping
track of employees, departments and projects. The working of the PWD
is as follows:
The activities of PWD are taken care by many inter-linking
departments. For the ease of administration each department is
positioned at more than one location. Each department has unique
department number, a name and an employee who heads the
department (Manager).
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At any given instance of time several construction projects are handled
by the PWD. Every project is controlled and monitored by exactly one
department though it may get the task performed by other
department/s. Some of the departments are categorised as purely non-
technical and these departments are not assigned the task of
controlling and monitoring the project – they just participate in project.
Each project is identified by an unique project code, project name,
department number of the controlling department, and its location.
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Each department has number of employees with different
skill set to carry out the task associated with the projects.
The employees details include employee code, name,
designation, address, date of birth, basic salary. Since most
of the employees perform critical assignments, the PWD
would like to store the details of the dependents of the
employees for the purpose of insurance. Every employee
reports to a supervisor and is allotted a department. An
employee may be assigned a task in one or several projects
and these projects may or may not be controlled by his/her
own department.
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With respect to the above findings, construct an ER model that will
include identification of entities, primary keys, relationships and
mapping, cardinality ratios and other constraints.
The entities identified in the findings of requirement analysis are:
ER Diagram
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Works
EMPLOYEE DEPARTMENT
in

Supervi
sed By

Heads
Controls
Dependents
are

Participates PROJECTS

DEPENDENTS
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Modelling using Entity-Relationship Diagram