Presentations:
• Details of speakers - Speakers, topics, times, contact details, special requirements (if any) e.g. data projection, audio, powerpoint version
• Details of Chairs (your model should be able to cope with more than one “N” number) for each presentation session, there are chairpersons who chair the presentations; they changeover at refreshment breaks, but we need to know which session each will do; contact details.
With the info above, can I fit both speakers and chairs attributes under one entity called 'Presentation' or should I create two new entities - one for speaker and one for Chairs?
Based on the question, it seems like you will want more entities than just those. It depends on if there are any other specifications and data related to each of the entities.
Anyways, here's one possible idea:
Presentations Entity
Persons Entity (name and contact details)
speaker_for relationship (Persons to Presentations)
chairperson_for relationship (Persons to Presentations)
This way someone can speak at many presentations or chair many presentations, and you can easily query that. Also a person could also speak at one presentation and chair another. You can just have a Speakers entity and a Chairs entity, but they are so similar it seems unnecessary to me.
Like I said, you could adapt this to your liking and conforming to other specs.
Related
I have a question which I feel might be simple. I am relatively new to databases. I was looking at this conceptual ERD and saw these relationships between Seat -> Musical_Performance & Customer -> Booking
Customer has 1..6 -> 0..* AND Musical_Performance 1..1 -> 100..1500
What relationships are these. Is Customer to Booking a many to many relationship and is
Musical_Performance to Seat a one to many?
Really confused about this and would appreciate anyone helping me out
You are right. Musical_Performance is one to many with seat. For each Musical Performance you can have multiple seats (100 to 1500).
Customer to Booking is many to many, each customer can have multiple booking (0 or more) but each booking can be connected just to 1-6 specific customers. This is probably comes to represent that you can book something for a family for example so one booking will have all of the family members customers.
WHat you have, looks like a Chen style ERD. These numbers can describe a minimum, or an optional:mandatory relationship. In this specific case, I'm not sure what they are relating to, but dig in:
https://www.smartdraw.com/entity-relationship-diagram/
and
https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/er-diagrams
and
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-mysql/0596008643/ch04s03.html
for more information.
I need to create a data model for an education based application. The question I want to ask is is it better to make one junction table for two tables with many-to-many relation or create one big junction table to deal with all many-to-many relationships?
Say, I have student, tutor, subject, grade tables.
student and tutor are in many-to-many
tutor and subject are in many-to-many
tutor and grade are also in many-to-many
A student can have many tutors for one subject of one grade.
There can be many tutors for one subject of one grade.
A subject of one grade can be taught by many tutors.
Above are just a few examples of the relationships.
My question is how to model these relationships efficiently? Should I have one junction table for each of the relationships or should I combine them into one big bridge table?
So, if I have a class table as well, then from the big bridge table I can get for which class which tutor taught which subject of what grade along with other details of the class.
Let's assume the database is not yet electronic, but a good old filing cabinet instead.
Let's assume the database is for a library, and there are a couple of distinct sorts of "many-to-many info" to be maintained : authors to books (coauthored books have >1 author), readers to books, readers to readers, book availability in possibly multiple site locations of the library, ...
Would you ever think of stashing all those distinct sorts of information in one big filing cabinet ? Imagine what the consequences are for its users ? Sometimes you'll be prohibited to do something "readers to books" merely because someone else is right there doing something "readers to readers". If and when you manage to gain access and it's finally your turn do so something, say "authors to books", your work will be slowed down because all the "readers to books" stuff might come in between and you'll have to spend extra time merely skipping the unneeded stuff. If a "conversion operation" must be performed, say, a new kind of many-to-many stuff is discovered and must be integrated in the single filing cabinet, the entire database is inaccessible while the conversion operation is being performed (people adding filing cards of a color that wasn't yet in use). Etc. etc. . Those undesirable properties carry over almost 1-1 to the electronic equivalent.
As someone else put it : don't be afraid of tables. It's what a DBMS is good at.
EDIT
Brief : just keep it at one table per fact type, and abstain from making (/trying to discover) geeky abstractions like "they're all just properties" / "they're all just some many-to-many-relation" / ... . They're geeky because an end user/business user will not "see" it. And thus there is no business value in making them.
This is an problem about drawing ERD in one of my course:
A local startup is contemplating launching Jungle, a new one stop
online eCommerce site.
As they have very little experience designing and implementing
databases, they have asked you to help them design a database for
tracking their operations.
Jungle will sell a range of products, and they will need to track
information such as the name and price for each. In order to sell as
many products as possible, Jungle would like to display short reviews
alongside item listings. To conserve space, Jungle will only keep
track of the three most recent reviews for each product. Of course, if
an item is new (or just unpopular), it may have less than three
reviews stored.
Each time a customer buys something on Jungle, their details will be
stored for future access. Details collected by Jungle include
customer’s names, addresses, and phone numbers. Should a customer buy
multiple items on Jungle, their details can then be reused in future
transactions.
For maximum convenience, Jungle would also like to record credit card
information for its users. Details stored include the account and BSB
numbers. When a customer buys something on Jungle, the credit card
used is then linked to the transaction. Each customer may be linked to
one or more credit cards. However, as some users do not wish to have
their credit card details recorded, a customer may also be linked to
no credit cards. For such transactions, only the customer and product
will be recorded.
And this is the solution:
The problem is the Buys action connect with 3 others entities: Product, Customer, and Card. I find this very hard to read and understand.
Is an action involving more than 2 entities common in production? If it is, how should I understand and use it? Or if it's not, what is the better way of design for this problem?
While the bulk of relationships in practice are binary relationships, ternary and higher relationships are normal elements of the entity-relationship model. Some examples are supplies (supplier_id, product_id, region_id) or enrolled (student_id, course_id, semester_id). However, they often get converted into entity sets via the introduction of a surrogate identifier, due to dislike of composite keys or confusion with network data models in which only directed binary relationships are supported.
Reading cardinality indicators on non-binary relationships are a common source of confusion. See my answer to designing relationship between vehicle,customer and workshop in erd diagram for more info on how I handle this.
Your solution has some problems. First, Buys is indicated as an associative entity, but is used like a ternary relationship with an optional role. Neither is correct in my opinion. See my answer to When to use Associative entities? for an explanation of associative entities in the ER model.
Modeling a purchase transaction as a relationship is usually a mistake, since relationships are identified by the (keys of the) entities they relate. If (CustomerID, ProductID) is identifying, then a customer can buy a product only once, and only one product per transaction. Adding a date/time into the relationship's key is better, but still problematic. Adding a surrogate identifier and turning it into a regular entity set is almost certainly the best course of action.
Second, the Crow's foot cardinality indicators are unclear. It looks like customers and products are optional in the Buys relationship, or even as if multiple customers could be involved in the same transaction. There are three different concepts involved here - optionality, participation and cardinality - which should preferably be indicated in different ways. See my answer to is optionality (mandatory, optional) and participation (total, partial) are same? for more on the topic.
A card is optional for a purchase transaction. From the description, it sounds as if cards may participate totally, meaning we won't store information about a card unless it's used in a transaction. Furthermore, only a single card can be related to each transaction.
A customer is required for a purchase transaction, and it sounds like customers may participate totally, meaning we won't store information about customers unless they purchase something. Only a single customer can be related to each transaction.
Products are required for a purchase transaction, and since we'll offer products before they're bought, products will participate partially in transactions. However, multiple products can be related to each transaction.
I would represent transactions for this problem with something like the following structure:
I'm not saying converting a ternary or higher relationship into an entity set is always the right thing to do, but in this case it is.
Physically, that would require two tables to represent (not counting Customer, Product, Card or ProductReview) since we can denormalize TransactionCustomer and TransactionCard into Transaction, but TransactionProduct is a many-to-many relationship and requires its own table (as do ternary and higher relationships).
Transaction (TransactionID PK, TransactionDateTime, CustomerID, CardID nullable)
TransactionProduct (TransactionID PK, ProductID PK, Quantity, Price)
Considering that this community has questions related to modeling databases, I am here seeking help.
I'm developing an auction system based on another one seen in a book I'm reading, and I'm having trouble. The problem context is the following:
In the auction system, a user makes product announcements (he/she defines a product). It defines
the product name, and the initial offer (called initial bid). The initial bid expresses the minimum amount to be offering. A
product only exists in the database when it is announced by a user. A
user defines a number of products, but a product belongs to a single
user.
Every product has an expiration date. When a certain date arrives, if
there are no offers for the product, it is not sold. If there are
offers for the product, the highest bidder wins the given product.
The offers have a creation date, and the amount offered. An offer is
made to a product from a user. A user can make different offers for
different products. A product can be offered by different users. The
same user can not do more than two offers for the same product.
This kind of context for me is easy to do. The problem is that I need to store a purchase. (I'm sorry, but I do not know if the word is that in English). I need a way to know which offer was successful, and actually "bought" a product. Relative to what was said, part of my Conceptual Model (Entity Relationship Diagram) is as follows:
I've tried to aggregate USERS with PRODUCTS, and make a connection/relationship between the aggregation and PRODUCTS, which would give me the PURCHASES event. When this was broken down (decomposed) I would have a table showing which offer bought what product.
Nevertheless, I would have a cardinality problem. This table would have two foreign keys. One for BIDS, and the other for PRODUCTS. This would allow an N-N relationship of these two, meaning that I could save more than one bid as the buyer of a product, or that the same bid could "buy" many products (so I say in the resulting PURCHASES table).
Am I not seeing something here? Can you guys help me with this? Thank you for reading, for your time, and patience. And if you need some more detail, please do not hesitate to ask.
EDIT
The property "Initial Bid" on the PRODUCTS entity is not a relationship.
This property represents a monetary value, a minimum amount that an offer must have to be given to a particular product.
You are approaching things backwards. First we determine a relevant application relationship, then we determine its properties. Given an application relationship and the possible application situations that can arise, only certain relationship/association sets/tables can arise. A purchase can have only one bid per product and one product per bid. So it is just a fact that the bid:product cardinality of PURCHASES is 1:1. Say so. This is so regardless of what other application relationships you wish to record. If it were a different application relationship between those entities then the cardinality might be different. Wait--USERS_PRODUCTS and BIDS form exactly such a pair of appplication relationships, with user:product being 1:0..N for the former and 0..N:0..N for the latter. Cardinality for each participant reflects (is a property of) the particular application relationship that a diamond represents.
Similarly: Foreign keys are properties of pairs of relationship/association sets/tables. Declaring them tells the DBMS to enforce that participant id values appear in entity sets/tables. Ie {bid} referencing BIDS and {product} referencing PRODUCTS. And candidate keys (of which one can be a primary key) are a property of a relationship set/table. It is the candidate keys of PURCHASES that lead to declaration of a constraint that enforces its cardinality. It isn't many:many on bid:product because "bid BID purchased product PRODUCT at price $AMOUNT on date DATE" isn't many:many on bid:product. Since either its bid or its product uniquely identify a purchase both {bid} and {product} are candidate keys.
Well... I tried to follow the given advices, and also tried to follow what I had previously spoken to do, using aggregation. It seems to me that the result is correct. Please observe:
Of course, a user makes offers for products. A user record can relate to multiple records in PRODUCTS. Likewise, a product can be offered by multiple users, and thus, a record in PRODUCTS can relate to multiple records on USERS. If I'm wrong on this, please correct me.
Looking at purchase, we see that a product is only properly purchased by a single bid. There is no way to say that a user buys a product, or a product purchase itself. It is through the relationship between USERS and PRODUCTS that an bid is created, and it is an bid that is able to buy a product. Thus, it is necessary to aggregate such a relationship, then set the purchase event.
We must remember that only one product can be purchased for a single bid. So here we have a cardinality of 1 to 1. Decomposition here will ask discretion of the data modeler.
By decomposing this Conceptual Model, we will have the following Logic Model:
Notice how relationships are respected with appropriate attributes. We can know who announced a product (the seller), and we can know what offers were made to it.
Now, as I said before, there is the PURCHASES relationship. As we have a relationship of 1 to 1 here, the rule tells us that we must choose which side the relationship will be interpreted (which entity shall keep such a relationship).
It is usually recommended to keep the relationship on the side that is likely in the future to become a "many". There is no need to do so in this case because it is clear that this relationship can not be preserved in a BIDS record. Therefore, we maintain such a relationship portrayed by "Winner Bid" on the PRODUCTS entity. As you can see, I set a unique identifier for BIDS. By defining the Physical Model, we have a surrogate key.
Well, I finish my answer here, but I think I can not consider it right yet. I would like someone to comment anything if possible. Thank you.
EDIT
I'd like to apologize. It seems that there was a mistake on my part. Well, I currently live in Brazil, and here we learn the ER-Diagram in a way that seems to me to be different from what many of you are used to. Until yesterday I've been answering some questions related to the subject here in the community, and I found odd certain different notations used. Only now I'm noticing that we are not speaking the same language. I believe it was embarrassing for me in a way. I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry.
Oh, and one more thing (it may be interesting for someone):
The cardinality between BIDS and PRODUCTS is really wrong. It should
be 0 to 1 in both, as was said in the comments.
There are no relationships relating with relationships here. We have
what is called here (in my country, or in my past course)
"Aggregation" (Represented in the first drawing by the rectangle with clipped lines). The internal relationship (BIDS) when decomposed will
become an entity, and the relationship between BIDS and PRODUCTS is
made later. An aggregation says that a relationship needs to be resolved first so that it can relate with another entity. This creates a certain restriction, which may be necessary in certain business rules. It says that the joining of two entities define records that relate to records of another entity.
Certain relationships do not necessarily need to be named. Once you
break down certain types of relationships, there is no need (it's
optional) to name them (between relations N to N), especially if new
relationship does not arise from these. Of course, if I were to name the white relationships presented, we then would have USER'S BIDS (between USERS and BIDS), and PRODUCT'S BIDS (between BIDS and PRODUCTS).
With respect to my study material, it's all in portuguese, and I believe you will not understand, I do not know. But here's one of the books I read during my past classes:
ISBN: 978-85-365-0252-6
Title: PROJETO de BANCO de DADOS Uma Visão Prática
Authors: Felipe Machado, Mauricio Abreu
Publishing company: EDITORA ÉRICA
COVER:
LINK:
http://www.editorasaraiva.com.br/produtos/show/isbn:9788536502526/titulo:projeto-de-banco-de-dados-uma-visao-pratica-edicao-revisada-e-atualizada/
Well... What do I do now? Haha... I do not know what to do. I'll leave my question here. If someone with the same method that I can help me, I'll be grateful. Thank you.
To record the winning bid requires a functional dependency Product ID -> Bid ID. This could be implemented as one or more nullable columns (since not all products have been purchased yet) in the Products table, or better in a separate table (Purchases) using Product ID as primary key.
I am building a music streaming site, where users will be able to purchase and stream mp3's. I have a subset entity diagram which can be described as follows:
I want to normalise the data to 3NF. How many tables would I need? obviously I want to avoid including partial dependancies, which would require more tables than just album, artist, songs - but I'm not sure what else to add? Any thoughts from experience?
Well, you've done the ER level. You need to identify Keys and Attributes before you can work out Functional Dependencies. There is a fair amount of work to do before you get to 3NF. Eg. Song Titles are duplicated.
Also, there are questions:
is the site selling Albums, Songs, or both ? (I've modelled both)
if both, how do you track a sale or download ?
do you care about the same Song title recorded by different Artists ?
Anyway, here is a resolved ▶Entity Relation Diagram◀, at least for the info provided. It is closer to 5NF than 3NF, but I cannot declare it as such, because it is not complete.
Readers who are unfamiliar with the Standard for Modelling Relational Databases may find ▶IDEF1X Notational◀ useful.
It uses a simple Supertype-Subtype structure, the Principle of Orthogonal Design. The Item that is sold ie either an Album xor a Song.
Feel free to ask clarifying questions.
You will need 4 tables: Artists, Songs, Albums, and AlbumSongs.
The last one is required since the exact same song (=same edit/version...) could be included in several albums, so you have there a m-to-m relationship.
I agree with iDevelop but with 1 extra table. Here is how I would model it.
Tables: Artist, Song, Album, AlbumSongMap, SingleInfo
If the song was a released as a single on a different date, you can get that from SingleInfo. The single may have been released with some cover art that is different from the album art. You would store the singles art in SingleInfo. MAYBE a song can be released as a single multiple times, with new cover art or something so it could possibly be a 1-many relation. Otherwise it is 1-1.
If you can join Song with SingleInfo that means it was released as a single. If you can join Song with Album (using the map) then you will find all the album's it was released under.
A digital enhancement to an old song is a new song. (or at least a different binary). You may want to further normalize Song to allow storage of digital enhancements without duplicating songName, etc.
When you switch over from ER modeling to relational modeling (tables), you need one table for each entity. You also need a table for some relationships.
In the diagram you've given us, both relationships are many to one. Many to one relationships do not require a table. You can get away with adding foreign keys to entity tables. Therefore the answer to your question is 3 tables: Artists, Albums and Songs.
However, I question your ER diagram. It seems to me that the "contains" relationship is really many to many. An album clearly contains many songs. But a given song can appear on more than one album. So there should be an arrowhead on the line that connects "contains" to "album".
If you accept this revision to your ER model, then the number of tables increases to 4: Artists, Albums, Songs, and Contains.
A similar argument might be made for Artist and Song. If two artists collaborate on a single song, (e.g. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing "Islands in the Stream" together,
then you might want to model "produces" as a many to many relationship. Now you need 5 tables: Artists, Albums, Songs, Contains and Produces.
Artists, Albums, and Songs are going to require a PK that identifies the corresponding entity. Entity integrity demands that the correspondence bewteen entity instances and table rows be one-to-one.
The Contains and Produces tables can be built without a separate Id attibute. You will need a pair of FKs in each of these tables, and you can declare a compound PK for each table consisting of the two FKs.
Referential integrity demands that you enforce the validity of FK references, either in your programs or by declaring a references constraint in the DB. I strongly prefer declaring the constraint in the DB.