Saturday, April 30, 2016

Entity relationship diagram to relational schema - Exercise 3

Solved Exercise - Reducing Entity Relationship Diagram into Tables, Convert ER diagram to tables, relational schemas, ER model to relational model


Entity Relationship Diagram Exercise 3


Question:
Convert/reduce the ER Diagram given in figure 1 below;
Figure 1 - ER diagram with Many to One relationship

Solution:

Given in the figure;

Entity sets and relationship sets

Name
Entity set / Relationship set
Type
Scientist
Entity set
Strong entity set
Invention
Entity set
Strong entity set
Invents
Relationship set
Many-to-One relationship

Entity set Scientist

Attributes
Attribute Type
Description
SID
Simple and Primary key
Scientist ID
SName
Simple
Scientist Name
RArea
Simple
Research Area
Country
Simple
Country

Entity set Invention

Attributes
Attribute Type
Description
IID
Simple and Primary key
Invention ID
IName
Simple
Name of the invention
Year
Simple
Year of invention

Reduction into relational schema

Strong entity setsEntity set that has a primary key to uniquely represent each entity is Strong entity set.
Strong entity sets can be converted into relational schema by having the entity set name as the relation schema name and the attributes of that entity set as the attributes of relation schema.
Then we have,
Scientist (SID, SName, RArea, Country)
Invention (IID, IName, Year)

Relationship setThe association between two or more entity sets is termed as relationship set.
A relationship may be either converted into a separate table or not. That can be decided based on the type of the relationship. Only many-to-many relationship needs to be created as a separate table.

Here, we are given a many-to-one relationship. That means, 

  • one entity (record/row) of Scientist is related to only one entity (records/rows) of Invention entity set (that is, a scientist is involved in only one invention) and, 
  • one entity (record/row) of Invention is related to one or more entities (records/rows) of Scientist entity set. (that is, one or more scientists collectively invented one thing).

To reduce the relationship Invents into relational schema, we need to include the primary key of one side relation schema (i.e., Invention) into the many side relation (i.e., Scientist) as foreign key. For example, in our case we can derive the final set of relation schemas as follows;

Include IID of Invention as the foreign key of Scientist
Scientist (SID, SName, RArea, Country, IID)
Invention (IID, IName, Year)

*********************
 





No comments:

Post a Comment

Featured Content

Multiple choice questions in Natural Language Processing Home

MCQ in Natural Language Processing, Quiz questions with answers in NLP, Top interview questions in NLP with answers Multiple Choice Que...

All time most popular contents

data recovery