What is the purpose of the Entity-Relationship Model (ERM) in database design?
ERM is a high-level representation of data requirements, ignoring implementation specifics.
In an airline reservation system, Passenger and Booking are $.
Passenger and Booking are entities.
What would 1 & 2 represent?
What do entities represent in an Entity-Relationship Model?
Entities aren’t the rows themselves, they define what kind of information those rows will hold.
What are relationships in the context of an Entity-Relationship Model?
Statements about two entities; can be reflexive (entity relates to itself).
What are attributes in an Entity-Relationship Model?
Descriptive properties of an entity.
In SQL implementation, what do entities typically become?
Entities typically become tables.
In SQL implementation, what do relationships become?
Relationships become foreign keys.
In SQL implementation, what do attributes become?
Attributes become columns.
What is an ER Diagram & it’s representations?
A visual representation showing:
Consider the ER Diagram
what would the entity-relationship-entity be read as?
What is a glossary document?
Glossary or data dictionary
Documents names, synonyms, and descriptions of entities, relationships, and attributes.
Define ‘Entity Type’ in the context of ER modeling.
Set of all instances
(e.g., all employees).
Define ‘Relationship Type’ in the context of ER modeling.
Set of related pairs
(e.g., Employee-Manages-Department).
Define Attribute Type in the context of ER modeling.
Set of values
(e.g., all employee salaries).
What is a supertype entity?
A general category that encompasses subtypes.
What is a subtype entity?
A specific subset of a supertype.
What does ‘IsA’ relationship refer to?
The relationship between a supertype and its subtypes.
A supertype may have $ subtypes.
Multiple
In ER modeling, what notation is used to represent cardinality?
Crow’s Foot Notation.
What does cardinality refer to in Entity-Relationship Modeling?
The maximum and minimum numbers of instances of one entity that can relate to a single instance of another entity.
What are the two maxima in a relationship?
One for each of the related entities, usually specified as either ‘one’ or ‘many’.
What are the typical options for relationship minima?
Zero (optional) or one (required).
What is a partition in the context of supertype and subtype entities?
A group of mutually exclusive subtypes within a supertype.