

How entities act upon each other or are associated with each other.

Foreign key: Identifies the relationship between entities. Primary key: A candidate key chosen by the database designer to uniquely identify the entity set. An entity set may have more than one candidate key. Candidate key: A minimal super key, meaning it has the least possible number of attributes to still be a super key. Super key: A set of attributes (one or more) that together define an entity in an entity set. Entity keys can be super, candidate or primary. An associative entity associates entities (or elements) within an entity set.Įntity keys: Refers to an attribute that uniquely defines an entity in an entity set.

A strong entity can be defined solely by its own attributes, while a weak entity cannot. A related term is instance, in which the specific person or car would be an instance of the entity set.Įntity categories: Entities are categorized as strong, weak or associative. Other examples: Customers who purchased last month, cars currently registered in Florida. Other examples: customers, cars or products.Įntity set: Same as an entity type, but defined at a particular point in time, such as students enrolled in a class on the first day. Research: Since so much research focuses on structured data, ER diagrams can play a key role in setting up useful databases to analyze the data.Įntity type: A group of definable things, such as students or athletes, whereas the entity would be the specific student or athlete.Education: Databases are today’s method of storing relational information for educational purposes and later retrieval, so ER Diagrams can be valuable in planning those data structures.Business process re-engineering (BPR): ER diagrams help in analyzing databases used in business process re-engineering and in modeling a new database setup.It can streamline processes, uncover information more easily and improve results. Any business process that uses fielded data involving entities, actions and interplay can potentially benefit from a relational database. Business information systems: The diagrams are used to design or analyze relational databases used in business processes.Drawing the diagram should reveal where it’s going wrong. Database troubleshooting: ER diagrams are used to analyze existing databases to find and resolve problems in logic or deployment.A relational database has an equivalent relational table and can potentially be expressed that way as needed. It’s also later used to model a particular database or databases.
Ir interpretation chart software#
