CS 1209: Database Systems

Conceptual Model
 Introduction
• The analysis of an Online Transaction
Processing System consists of the following:
1. Analysis of Requirements
• User needs in terms of business rules
2. Conceptual Design
3. Logical Design
4. Physical Design
 Conceptual Design
• Mapping of the real-world needs into
technical requirements.
– The Entity Relational Model
• The output of the ER Model should answer
the following:
– What are the entities and relationships?
– What information about them should be stored?
– What are the integrity constraints or business
rules that hold?
Logical Design and Physical Design
• Logical Design
– The ER model is mapped into a normalized
Relational data model.
• Physical Design
– Consists of SQL programming
• Create, populate and query a relational database.
 Entity Relationship Model
(Designed by Peter Chen)
• Entity
– Represents a thing or object of the real world and is
distinguished from others according to its
characteristics.
• An Entity Set is a collection of
similar entities, or instance, a set of all
students, and is represented by a rectangle.

• Attributes are the properties of

entities. These are represented by means of
ellipse.
 Entity Relationship Model
(Cont..)
• Key is an attribute or a collection of attributes
that uniquely identifies an entity among an entity
set.
– A key is underlined.
• A superkey is as set of attributes (one or more)
that collectively identifies an entity in an entity
set.
• A primary key is one of the candidate keys chosen
by the database designed to uniquely identify the
entity set.
 Entity Relationship Model
(Cont..)
• A relationship
– This is an association among two or more entities,
e.g Asma is enrolled at SUZA.
• A relationship set
– It is a collection of similar relationships.
• It is represented by a rhombus.
• Cardinality
– Specifies how many instances of an entity relate
to one instance of another entity.
 Binary Cardinalities
• One-to-one
Wor Departme
Employee
1 k 1 nt

• One-to-Many
Wor Departme
Employee 1 M
k nt

• Many-to-One
Wor Departme
Employee M 1
k nt

• Many-to-Many
Wor Departme
Employee M M
k nt
 More Terminologies
• Entity Schema
– Definition of a structure of an entity.
• Redundancy
– Storage of same data several times in different places in the
same database.
• Inocnsistency
– When redundant data are not equal to each other
• Intension (Database Schema)
– Is a set of definition of data structures for a particular database.
• Instance
– Actual content of the database or the data at a particular time.
– Usually change with time.
Peter Chen’s Entity Relational Diagram
• Rectangles represent entity types
• Ellipses represent attributes
• Diamonds represent relationship types
• Lines links attributes to entity types and entity
types to relationship types.
• Primary keys are underlined.
 Summary
• Conceptual Design (More Abstract)
– The output is the Entity Relational Model
• Logical Design
– The output is the Relational Model
• Physical Design
– DDL File